The emerging Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications will enable a variety of applications for safety, traffic efficiency, driver assistance, as well as infotainment to be incorporated into modern automobile designs. This project explores wireless access technologies to provide infotainment and safety applications in high speed vehicular environments using the license-free TV white space (TVWS) band. The project considers coverage prediction and performance evaluation on potential vehicular communication standards; namely the 802.11af operating in TVWS, LTE at 800MHz and their high frequency counterparts.

Realistic rural and urban location maps are incorporated into a 3-dimensional ray tracing tool, for the purpose of exploring the coverage and the error resilience of the standards in a fast fading propagation environment. All standards are compared with respect to their underlying dependency on various parameters such as vehicle speed, correlation, user location and packet size. Single antenna (SISO) and multiple antenna (MIMO) performance analysis of WhiteFi at 600MHz, WiFi at 2.4GHz, LTE at 800MHz and LTE at 2.6GHz are considered and their performance is examined in terms of packet error rate (PER) and throughput, as well as QoS for a range of vehicular applications in different environments and speeds. Two scenarios are considered, the Bristol city centre to represent an urban scenario and a Wales rural scenario. Results indicate that 802.11systems in TVWS provide superior coverage, especially in the case of rural propagation and are less susceptible to Doppler.