Abstract-Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) was designed to provide reliable wireless communication for intelligent transportation system applications. Sharing information among cars and between cars and the infrastructure, pedestrians, or "the cloud" has great potential to improve safety, mobility and fuel economy. DSRC is being considered by the US Department of Transportation to be required for ground vehicles. In the past, their performance has been assessed thoroughly in the labs and limited field testing, but not on a large fleet. In this paper, we present the analysis of DSRC performance using data from the world's largest connected vehicle test program-Safety Pilot Model Deployment lead by the University of Michigan. We first investigate their maximum and effective range, and then study the effect of environmental factors, such as trees/foliage, weather, buildings, vehicle travel direction, and road elevation. The results can be used to guide future DSRC equipment placement and installation, and can be used to develop DSRC communication models for numerical simulations.Index Terms-DSRC, VANET, Vehicle-to-infrastructure communication
I. INTRODUCTIONedicated short-range communication (DSRC) supports short range and reliable data communication between vehicles and with infrastructures to enable a number of safety, mobility, and energy applications [1]. A set of Basic Safety Messages (BSM) has been defined in SAE J2735 to ensure safety critical messages such as vehicle position, velocity, headway, and deceleration are broadcasted at a frequency of 10Hz. In the European Union, the Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) have been specified in an ITS standard [2].Extended from IEEE 802.11a wireless communication protocol, which was designed for short range, low mobility, indoor use, IEEE 802.11p [3] is designed to meet the requirements of longer range (up to 1 km), extremely high mobility, and rapidly changing channel conditions. Because of these differences, DSRC operates at a higher frequency band, between 5.850 GHz and 5.925 GHz. This band is "dedicated" by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for intelligent transportation system applications, to reduce the possibility of interference with other wireless devices [4]. Since one of the major purposes of DSRC is safety, reliable communication is critical.