Project: #173 Connected Vehicle Infrastructure for a Smart City Progress Report - Reporting Period Ending: Sept. 30, 2018 Principal Investigator: Jon Peha Status: Active Start Date: July 1, 2018 End Date: June 30, 2019 Research Type: Advanced Grant Type: Research Grant Program: FAST Act - Mobility National (2016 - 2022) Grant Cycle: 2018 Mobility21 UTC Progress Report (Last Updated: Sept. 16, 2018, 10:11 a.m.) % Project Completed to Date: 20 % Grant Award Expended: 20 % Match Expended & Document: 20 USDOT Requirements Accomplishments The long-term goal of this research is to provide credible and quantitative results that shed light on the most cost-effective strategies for wireless smart city infrastructure to support connected vehicles. The goal for 2018 is to address major changes in the connected vehicle landscape that have emerged in just the last year or two. During the period ending in September 2018, the major activities performed were twofold. One activity was to make progress on a detailed quantitative analysis of the use of infrastructure and spectrum to support connected vehicles. The second major activity was to write, publish and present our early findings in journal papers and conferences in the areas of transportation and communications. The specific objectives accomplished in this period are as follows. The first objective was to determine cost savings from infrastructure sharing, when it is deployed by government agencies and shared with private parties. We considered a base-case scenario where the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) mandates vehicles to be equipped with connected vehicle technology for safety purposes, and the technology they choose is DSRC. Both assumptions are consistent with 2016 DOT proposals, although we may revisit these assumptions in future work. In our analysis, local and state governments deploy infrastructure of roadside units (RSUs) for safety, and those RSUs can be shared with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for a fee, perhaps through some form of public-private partnership. ISPs have typically provided Internet access for users in vehicles via macrocellular networks. Nevertheless, the volume of data from mobile Internet has been increasing sharply, and connected vehicles using V2V/V2I links could carry some Internet dataat a lower cost than macrocellular networks can (Ligo et al. 2017). Therefore, ISPs could reduce cost by taking advantage of roadside units (RSUs) that serve as Internet gateways, rather than deploying cell towers alone. ISPs could deploy their own RSUs, or ISPs could share the ones deployed by governments, resulting in cost savings for the government. We have found that for a nationwide deployment, government savings would be about one fifth of the investment in safety RSUs, greatly reducing the burden on state and local transportation agencies. However, those savings depend on location. For some locations, government savings can be up to 80%. For others, such as sparsely-populated rural areas, no savings are possible. Alternatively, governments may widely deploy other types of infrastructure that could be shared. In this project we considered the deployment of “smart” streetlights with communications capability, such as those used to aid services such as public safety, air quality monitoring, etc. Those streetlights may provide cheap access to power, poles and communications backhaul. They are typically available in more locations than safety RSUs. We have found that sharing smart streetlights could result $200 million of government savings on a nationwide scale, which is similar to the savings estimated for sharing of safety infrastructure. The second specific objective accomplished of the project is to determine what pricing strategies governments should adopt to share their infrastructure. By sharing safety RSUs or streetlights, governments might charge adopt pricing strategies either to maximize either government savings or social welfare. In our model, we quantified the increase in overall social welfare by providing Internet access through shared RSUs, as well as the reduction in taxation needed to finance government infrastructure, and provided guidance to government agencies seeking to maximize either of these objectives, or some combination. We have found that the strategy that maximizes government savings often differs from the pricings strategy that maximizes social welfare, although the difference is not great. Another specific objective is to investigate the robustness of the results above with respect to the assumptions that are most likely to vary, are most uncertain or have the most impact. Some of those assumptions are expected to change over time, such as rates of Internet data and DSRC penetration in vehicles. With sharing of either safety RSUs or streetlights, we have found that nationwide social welfare plus the reduced burden of taxation are significantly higher than base estimates if either data rates or penetration increases as expected. Uncertainty in assumptions such as the cost of cell towers may also have a major impact on results. The more expensive the cost of a tower, the higher is the cost savings to provide Internet access over DSRC RSUs. For example, land and legal costs can be major components, which vary by location. We found that if a macrocell costs on average half of the base assumption, government savings are significantly less, and DSRC-based Internet access might be cost-effective in fewer locations than predicted with base case assumptions. On the other hand, we found that uncertainty in factors such as the cost of an Internet-only RSU and the cost to upgrade safety RSUs or streetlights have limited effect on nationwide results. We have also made progress on objectives in the investigation of spectrum usage by connected vehicles and unlicensed devices, although this work is still in progress. One of these objectives is to assess how much spectrum should be made available for vehicular communications. The U.S Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has allocated 75 MHz of spectrum in 5.9 GHz (the so-called “ITS band”) for DSRC V2V and V2I communications (Lansford, Kenney, and Ecclesine 2013; U.S. Federal Communications Commission 2004). The question of whether all that spectrum should be used exclusively by DSRC devices is hotly debated. For example, it has been proposed that part of the ITS band should be used exclusively by DSRC devices while unlicensed devices are allowed in the other part (Qualcomm 2013). For our analysis, we are considering the scenario in which DSRC-based safety messages are transmitted over spectrum that is not shared for other types of communications, while additional spectrum is used to transmit DSRC-based communications other than safety (i.e., Internet data). We have found that there are realistic scenarios where allocating spectrum far in excess of what is used for safety enhances social welfare, and there are also realistic scenarios where the amount currently allocated is too much. We continue to analyze the factors that affect the socially optimal allocation. Another specific objective related to spectrum use is to determine whether part of the ITS band allocated exclusively for DSRC devices should be shared with unlicensed devices, such as laptops, tablets and smartphones using Wi-Fi. The FCC issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to permit unlicensed devices in that band (U.S. Federal Communications Commission 2013). However, to date there has been no consensus on whether to share and the rules to be adopted if such sharing is allowed (Lansford et al. 2015). So far, we are finding that sharing of at least some (although not necessarily all) ITS spectrum with Wi-Fi unlicensed devices is highly efficient. In some realistic scenarios, we have found that vehicles and unlicensed devices using separate bands might require 50-100% more bandwidth than would be required to achieve the same average throughputs in shared spectrum. We continue to explore other scenarios. In the coming six months, we will continue our analysis of spectrum allocation for intelligent transportation systems and spectrum sharing in the scenarios described above, and will begin sharing findings with the world. We then plan to revisit some of the underlying assumptions, and consider how a change in those assumptions could affect our recommendations to local, state and federal transportation agencies, connected vehicular technology developers, and the Federal Communications Commission. It is no longer clear that government will mandate V2X technology, as appeared to be the case not long ago. Moreover, DSRC is no longer the only technology that one might consider to support short-range communications with connected vehicles and roadside infrastructure. Cellular operators have already been increasing reliance on microcells and femtocells in recent years, but in the past these devices have been problematic for vehicles because handoff times are far too slow for a device that is moving at 50 miles per hour, and end-to-end latency in the cellular network may be too high to satisfy requirements of road safety applications (Lee et al. 2017) .More recently, standardization bodies in the cellular industry such as the 3GPP have been advancing a set of standards known as cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) that includes V2V, V2I, and vehicle-to-base stations. With more options, it is no longer clear whether DSRC, C-V2X, or even some combination of technologies is the best option. Moreover, the cellular technology itself is in flux. For example, unlike DSRC, the initial release is not suitable for high-data-rate users that are explicitly considered in our research, but releases under current development may be. For the portions of the standard that are complete, deployment can still take many forms that have yet to be determined. In the coming months, we will investigate some of these issues, and their implications for decisions about connected vehicle infrastructure, as well as connected vehicle spectrum. Many of the findings above are described in a series of research papers. (See Products – Publications.) One of those papers (Ligo and Peha 2018a) is published in the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, which is a journal intended to reach research audiences both in the transportation and communications communities. Another paper (Ligo and Peha 2018b) is expected to reach a broader audience in the wireless communications community. We have also submitted to IEEE DySPAN, which is one of the most important conferences in the world on spectrum issues, both from technical and public policy perspectives. Since the audience is not limited to practitioners in the transportation area, we expect to make our work known and receive input from members of communities that are not usually aware of specific issues about connected vehicles. The other paper published during this period (Ligo et al. 2017) is intended to reach an even broader audience. It is in the IEEE Access journal, which is an “is an award-winning, multidisciplinary” journal that presents results of “original research or development across all of IEEE's fields of interest.” (IEEE 2018) Besides, our work has been disseminated outside the research community. In July, the PI presented our work at the ASCE-ICTD 2018, which is ASCE’s flagship conference in the transportation and development areas. ASCE is U.S.’s oldest engineering society, representing more than 150,000 members of the civil engineering profession all over the world. The PI is also going to present our work at a conference about smart cities in the Fall of 2018, hosted by the Allegheny County & Western PA Association of Township Commissioners. With this presentation we expect to outreach and influence members of local governments in Western Pennsylvania. We also expect to have our work known to members of the state government, since the Allegheny County & Western PA Association of Township Commissioners lobbies with the Pennsylvania government. IEEE. 2018. “IEEE Access: The Multidisciplinary Open Access Journal.” 2018. ieeeaccess.ieee.org. Lansford, Jim, John B. Kenney, and Peter Ecclesine. 2013. “Coexistence of Unlicensed Devices with DSRC Systems in the 5.9 GHz ITS Band.” In 2013 IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference, 9–16. https://doi.org/10.1109/VNC.2013.6737584. Lansford, Jim, John B. Kenney, Peter Ecclesine, Tevfik Yucek, and Paul Spaanderman. 2015. “Final Report of DSRC Coexistence Tiger Team.” Lee, Kwonjong, Joonki Kim, Yosub Park, Hanho Wang, and Daesik Hong. 2017. “Latency of Cellular-Based V2X: Perspectives on TTI-Proportional Latency and TTI-Independent Latency.” IEEE Access 5: 15800–809. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2731777. Ligo, Alexandre K., and Jon M. Peha. 2018a. “Cost-Effectiveness of Sharing Roadside Infrastructure for Internet of Vehicles.” IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems 19 (7): 2362–72. https://doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2018.2810708. Ligo, Alexandre K., Jon M. Peha, Pedro Ferreira, and João Barros. 2017. “Throughput and Economics of DSRC-Based Internet of Vehicles.” IEEE Access 6: 7276–90. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2785499. Ligo, Alexandre K, and Jon M. Peha. 2018b. “Spectrum for Intelligent Transportation Systems: Allocation and Sharing.” In To Appear in IEEE International Symposium on Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks, DySPAN. Qualcomm. 2013. “Comments of Qualcomm Incorporated.” ET Docket No. 13-49. http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7022418821. U.S. Federal Communications Commission. 2004. “Report And Order 03-324.” U.S. Federal Communications Commission. 2004. 2010. Connecting America: The National Broadband Plan. USA. https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.20038. U.S. Federal Communications Commission. 2004. 2013. “Revision of Part 15 of the Commission’s Rules to Permit Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) Devices in the 5 GHz Band. Notice of Proposed Rulemaking 13-22 (Docket 13-49).” https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-13-22A1.pdf. Impacts Due to its interdisciplinary nature, the project has had impact in the body of knowledge not only in the transportation field, but also in the areas of wireless communications and Internet policy. In the area of transportation, we have produced knowledge that can inform decisions about alternative uses of DSRC technology. More specifically, we have identified an approach to infrastructure sharing between government transportation agencies and commercial ISPs that could benefit both, as well as Internet users and tax-payers. In addition, we have explored the pricing policies that government agencies might adopt in such arrangements, quantified the trade-offs implicit in pricing, and shown how optimal pricing varies from urban areas to rural areas. Our results will be of help to any government agencies who choose to share infrastructure. Finally, we have shown that if DSRC technology becomes widespread, as it would under federal policies promulgated by the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2016, then the sharing strategies we propose could cover roughly 20% of the cost of safety infrastructure, making the adoption of this potentially life-saving technology far more affordable, which may expand deployment and reduce the burden on tax-payers. Such results inform policy, and are important when developing local, state and federal budgets. Of course, since the 2016 rules have not been adopted so far, government agencies cannot accept our results at face value, but they are illustrative of what is possible, In the federal level, our research has impact on the current debate about the use of spectrum for Intelligent Transportation Systems. While it has been recently proposed that spectrum is shared between vehicular and unlicensed devices, transportation authorities have concerns that such sharing may cause harmful interference to vehicular communications. Our ongoing research suggests that as long as safety messages are transmitted on exclusive spectrum, policymarkers in the federal level could allow vehicles and unlicensed devices to share spectrum for non-safety communications in a highly efficient way. When these results become public, we expect them to have impact on this important debate for the future of connected vehicles. Our contributions also advance knowledge in the areas of wireless communications and Internet policy. Expanding Internet infrastructure to keep up with the growth in the demand for mobile Internet is costly. ISPs have been using alternative technologies such as Wi-Fi to offload some of the mobile Internet data, but Wi-Fi hotspots are not suitable to offload data of fast-moving users such as those in vehicles. We have demonstrated that DSRC technology is a promising and largely ignored alternative that Internet operators should consider. We have shown that the approach can be more cost-effective than other technologies in urban areas, although not in rural areas. A reduction in costs for network operators is likely to lead to more affordable Internet services for consumers. During this report period, this project has enabled the direct development of human resources. The funding from this project has helped support the dissertation work of PhD student who is a member of a underrepresented group (Hispanic). In addition, as a result of this research, two educational modules have been developed. One has been used in a course on Policies of Wireless Systems, and the other has been used in a course on Internet Policy, both taught by the PI at Carnegie Mellon University. Other none Outcomes New Partners none Issues none