VANET Architectures and Protocol Stacks: A Survey

Sajjad Akbar Mohammad, Asim Rasheed, and Amir Qayyum

Center of Research in Networks and Telecom (CoReNeT),

Mohammad Ali Jinnah University (MAJU),
Islamabad, Pakistan
sajjad_akr@yahoo.com, asim@corenet.org.pk, qayyum@gmail.com

Abstract. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) provide a set of standards for

vehicular communications. The main focus of research activities, within ITS,
has been on development of safety, traffic efficiency and infotainment related
applications. Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I)
communications are the main research goals of ITS. This paper reviews some
popular architectures of VANETs (Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks) i.e., WAVE
by IEEE, CALIM by ISO, C2CNet by C2C consortium / GeoNet. It also
includes some recent research regarding these standards, specially focusing on
Network and MAC layer issues. This paper also discusses safety related
application protocols, i.e. WSMP by WAVE, CALM FAST by ISO and
C2CNet by C2C consortium. Various recommendations regarding the above
protocol stacks are presented. The recommendations are based on different
parameters like flexibility, implementation etc.

Keywords: VANET, ITS, WAVE, CALM, C2C-CC.

1 Introduction

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) address the critical problem of traffic safety.
Bodies (like IEEE, CALM and C2C-CC) under ITS made tremendous efforts for
achieving this goal by making the road traffic management efficient through help of
different applications and protocols. The ratio of road accidents can be reduced by
using proper traffic management applications. ITS is working on such traffic
management solutions to make our vehicular systems safe and better. ITS also
discusses the security issues related to these safety applications. Organizations like,
International Standard Organization (ISO), Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers (IEEE) and Car-to-Car Communication Consortium / GeoNet are working
on ITS architecture proposals.
IEEE introduced a complete protocol stack of 1609 protocol family and named it
‘WAVE’ (Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment). Standard is divided in
different sub standards to ensure a modular handling of the diverse issues at different
layers. It supports dedicated short range communications (DSRC). WAVE enlists two
modes of communication:

T. Strang et al. (Eds.): Nets4Cars/Nets4Trains 2011, LNCS 6596, pp. 95–105, 2011.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
96 M.S. Akbar, A. Rasheed, and A. Qayyum

i. Safety applications (Non-IP), and

ii. Non-safety applications based on IPV6.
The approved frequency band is 5.9 GHz (in Europe 5 GHz).
ISO’s proposal for VANETs is CALM, a Continuous Air Interface for Long to
Medium range. ISO CALM was designed to address the issues of continuous
communication among vehicles and between vehicles & roadside infrastructure. The
concept of CALM is based on heterogeneous cooperative communication framework
to provide continuous communication to user transport. Different implementation
projects like COOPERS and SAFESPOT included the main concept of CALM in
their work. CALM proposes the use of all available interfaces as opposed to the use of
single 802.11p proposed by WAVE.
The Car-to-Car Consortium (C2C-CC) [1] is backed by European car industry.
They are working on Car-to-Car and Car to Infrastructure communication,
specifically for safety applications. They proposed C2CNet architecture for safety
applications. C2CNet is further incorporated by GeoNet in their comprehensive
architecture under project COMeSafety. C2CNet is based on geographical routing, in
addition to uni-cast and broadcast design proposed by other two architectures. C2C-
CC deals with safety as well as non-safety applications. Non-safety applications use
IPv6 on wireless multi-hop links to communicate with OBUs (on Board Units), RSUs
(Road Side Units) and can access internet for other applications.
IETF is another standard body working on mobile networks and introduced the
concept of NEMO (Network Mobility) in MANET. Different projects were started by
European countries to realize ITS’s proposals. Some of these are NOW, COMeSafety,
CVIS, SAFESPOT, COOPERS, GST, GeoNet, FleetNet, GrooveSim, CARLINK,
CarTalk2000 etc.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews the VANETs
protocol stacks in detail. In section 3, a comparative analysis of VANETs
architectures is presented. Section 4 concludes the paper and enlists the goals which
may be pursued in future.

2 VANETs Protocol Stacks

This section discusses the VANETs protocol stacks in detail. The discussion focuses
on Network, MAC and PHY layers for WAVE, CALM and C2CNet. The approved
frequency band is 5.9 GHz for all standards [2]. It was initially approved by U.S
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under Dynamic Short Range
Communication (DSRC) concept. The spectrum is divided into six service channels
(SCH) and one control channel (CCH) with equal bandwidth of 10 MHz each. For
emergency messages (originated by safety related applications) and control messages,
CCH is used. SCH is used for other applications’ packets. The entire spectrum is
divided into time slots of 50 ms. If the CCH channel is active, all nodes are bound to
stop their communication during CCH time frame to receive and transmit emergency
messages on CCH channel.