Developments and constraints in 802.11-based roadside-to-vehicle communications

Vehicular communication has recently become popular for delivering traffic information and broadband services to the commuters. The feasibility of using the opportunistic short interval connections between vehicles and between vehicles and the roadside infrastructure is under scrutiny. The main motivation behind writing this review is that several survey works addressing inter-vehicle communications are available in literature but hardly any survey article on roadside-to-vehicle (R2V) communication is known to the authors. Here, we discuss the latest standards and protocols which can allow the use of already available WLAN infrastructure in the vehicular context. The use of roadside WLAN APs would provide the same services as those envisaged by the intelligent transportation systems using the dedicated roadside base stations. In this paper, we give an overview of the recent developments, limitations, standards and protocols that can facilitate 802.11-based R2V communication.