Mitigation of Civilian-to-Military Interference in DSRC for Urban Operations

Abstract: Dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) attracts popularity in the military applications thanks to its easiness in establishment, no need for paid subscription, and wide compatibility with any other IEEE 802.11 standards. The main challenge in DSRC is congestion due to existence of only 7 channels, which may not be enough to accommodate the increased number of transmitters expected to be deployed in the near future. Recently, there are a myriad of urban operation scenarios for the military including urban warfare and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief (HA/DR). The key challenge is that the communications among the military vehicles can be interfered by civilian users. It is the desire that the messages transmitted by the military vehicles hold a higher significance so that they can avoid the interference coming from the civilian users, which is not supported in the current version of DSRC. As a remedy, this paper proposes a protocol that prioritizes the military DSRC users while muffling the civilian DSRC users. Our results show that this prioritization method achieves higher communications performances for the military DSRC users.