Project: #383 Bringing Connected Vehicle Communications to Unlicensed Spectrum Progress Report - Reporting Period Ending: March 30, 2023 Principal Investigator: Jon Peha Status: Active Start Date: July 1, 2022 End Date: June 30, 2023 Research Type: Advanced Grant Type: Research Grant Program: FAST Act - Mobility National (2016 - 2022) Grant Cycle: 2022 Mobility21 UTC Progress Report (Last Updated: March 27, 2023, 10:41 a.m.) % Project Completed to Date: 40 % Grant Award Expended: 40 % Match Expended & Document: 40 USDOT Requirements Accomplishments The objective of this project is to explore spectrum management approaches that would make it possible to support the communications needs of connected vehicles despite the fact that the Federal Communication Commission reduced the spectrum available for this purpose by 60%, thereby creating spectrum scarcity. More specifically, we are developing methods that would allow vehicles and roadside infrastructure to make effective use of the unlicensed band that is adjacent to the Intelligent Transportation Services (ITS) band, thereby once again giving vehicles a much larger and contiguous block of spectrum. A big accomplishment of this project has been to make great progress on a novel modification the C-V2X protocol that would allow C-V2X to share spectrum with unlicensed devices such as Wi-Fi in a way that is spectrally efficient and that can protect quality of service for C-V2X. A second accomplishment has been to make progress on developing software that allows us to simulate both existing technologies and novel variations to see how well they operate. We have been simulating highway scenarios, in which all cars move in one direction along a long highway, with unlicensed devices on both sides. We have produced results showing that it is possible to protect C-V2X communications and achieve a high packet reception ration for connected vehicles while incurring a small degradation of Wi-Fi performance for Wi-Fi devices near the highway and no effect on Wi-Fi devices far from the highway, all without making any changes to the Wi-Fi devices and without central coordination. We disseminated our results through a poster session at the Traffic 21 / Mobility 21 Symposium in November of 2022. We intend to disseminate these results more broadly in the future. This project has provided opportunities for professional development to a recent graduate of a Ph.D. program, who is now working as a postdoctoral fellow. The PI of this project also taught a graduate course at Carnegie Mellon that presents material from this research project. 45 students took this class. Impacts We have made progress on a novel approach that would allow connected vehicles to effectively use unlicensed spectrum while maintaining adequate quality of service. This will constitute a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge related C-V2X technology and the body of knowledge related to spectrum policy and spectrum sharing more generally. This research is intended to support informed decisions by policymakers on spectrum decisions related to connected vehicles. In the U.S., those decisions ultimately fall to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In 2022, the PI of this project joined the Technological Advisory Council (TAC) of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He is an active member of the subcommittee of the TAC that the FCC has tasked with investigating the future communications needs of connected vehicles. Thus, he is able to disseminate ideas by participating in private discussions among TAC committee members and FCC staff that occur every week, and public discussions that occur a few times per year. We have also filed a paper with the FCC that discusses challenges of adjacent channel interference involving connected vehicle systems. Other We made progress in the invention of a novel way for intelligent transportation systems to make effective use of unlicensed spectrum in a way that meets the quality of service objectives for connected vehicles, the quality of service objectives for unlicensed devices such as Wi-Fi, and the desires of spectrum regulators to improve spectrum efficiency. Outcomes New Partners None Issues It was expected that this grant would support 100% of a postdoc, and a small fraction of a professor. After a successful Fall semester, the postdoc went home to China in December 2022, expecting to return to Pittsburgh a couple weeks later. He was never able to return to the U.S., or work further on the project. The majority of the money was never spent, and was reclaimed by Mobility 21 to spend on other projects. Obviously, this will affect both what can be accomplished this year, and what will be spent.