Empowering Infotainment Applications: A Multi-Channel Service Management Framework for Cognitive Radio Enabled Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The idea of letting vehicles communicate with each other has given rise to a vast number of novel applications that provide value added services to travellers, such as information, advertisements, and entertainment, to make their journeys convenient and enjoyable. However, these applications may require more throughput than conventional safety applications. Cognitive Radio (CR) technology has been considered as a potential solution to satisfy the throughput demands of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Infotainment applications may be offered on Television White Spaces (TVWS) employing CRs. Nevertheless, a proper mechanism is required to discover services offered on TVWS, and also to establish and maintain connections between a provider and a user of application services. This necessitates a communication channel common to all the nodes in a vehicular network to exchange signalling information. Nonetheless, our simulations indicate severe packet losses when a single channel is used for this purpose. In this paper, we present a service management framework that employs multiple channels in the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) spectrum in accordance with the IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) standard while continuously evaluating channel congestion. We implement our algorithm on the well-known discreet event simulator OMNeT++. The results show a significant improvement up to 91% in the packet reception using the developed multi-channel framework.