Starting to work with 802.11p WAVE for VANET

Question

I was planning on building an application based on inter vehicle communication.

Initially I thought of using the standard wifi available on laptops and mobie phones, but then I came across WAVE protocol (IEEE 802.11p) (as it is specifically designed for such applications).

1. Can I use a laptop/phone on 802.11p wifi? if not,
2. Can I get a hardware that supports this protocol (more info please) ? if not,
3. Can I use the standard Wifi and build the application and assume that it can easily be implemented on 802.11p protocl later (I don't know the differences between the protocols) ? if not,
4. Should simulate my application (probably using ns2) ? (This is my last option)

Thank You

Answer 1

There are certain wifi cards where the radio can be tuned to 802.11p frequencies, e.g. this one: http://www.mikrotik.com/pdf/R52.pdf is a cheap option. From the software side:

• the ath5k driver in recent versions of Linux already supports half-rate channels with the necessary PHY settings
• you also need modifications to the MAC to be 802.11p compliant
• you need a 802.11p compatible regulatory database
• something to be able to flip the radio to 802.11p mode (e.g. by modifying iw).

WAVE also assumes a specific protocol stack, from a network layer point of view using either IPv6 or WSMP. How to develop WAVE applications is a good question, I'm not aware of any public SDKs or implementations you could use.