WiFi-Assisted Control Traffic Offloading in Vehicular Environments

Targeting mobile vehicle communications, Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) wireless technology has been widely used in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Though DSRC can provide reliable and low-latency communications for various VANET applications, the multi-channel operations standardized by IEEE 802.11p suffer from high contention on control channel, especially in dense traffic scenarios. Meanwhile, as a conventional wireless technology for VANET communications, WiFi is often underutilized when a vehicle is on road. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach that can effectively offload control frames from DSRC to WiFi when the control traffic is dense, resulting in significantly improved throughput of control traffic (about 28.7% under moderate traffic density in simulation).