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A Survey On Spectrum Access Technologies and Persisting Challenges

Author 1, Author 2, Author 3
January 2014
IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials
We thank the editor and reviewers for their times, insightful, and helpful feedback on our survey.
We have carefully considered their feedback and modified the survey to take into account their
suggestions and comments. For their convenience, we have retyped the comments in italics followed
by our response in bold.

Reviewer #1
1) For vehicular networks, many applications have stringent delay constraints. The WSMP module in
the WAVE protocol stack could be discussed with more details and examples.
Thank you for pointing out this suggestion. The WSMP module was discussed in more details.
The reviewer is kindly invited to go over the amended relevant section and give us his feedback if
further elaboration is needed.
2) The classification of wireless networks in Fig. 1 and in Introduction could be better clarified, where
ad hoc networks is put in the Legacy Wireless Networks category. Is not vehicular networks a special case
of ad hoc networks? The early applications of ad hoc networks are battlefield networks with transceivers
mounted on vehicles. Or do you mean wireless mesh networks?
Thank you for attracting our attention to this issue. Indeed, Figure 1 was better clarified and
more examples were provided making it easier for the reader to capture the main reasons behind
the classification illustrated in Figure 1. We kindly invite the reviewer to check out the changes in
the newly submitted revision of the original manuscript.
3) In the application example shown in Fig. 2: It is not feasible to require all vehicles are equipped
with the communication system. Even so, the communication systems may use different protocols. The
backward compatibility issue and the interoperability issue should be addressed here. This is because
for the application discussed, the vehicle in question would be safe if all the surrounding vehicles are
cooperative.
Thank you for pointing out this issue and allowing us to better explain this scenario: in a vehicular
network, and in the case where vehicles are equipped with a communication system and using the

same communication protocol, safety messages are disseminated over the Control CHannel (CCH),
and they are intended to assist the driver in making decisions that for his own safety as well as
for the safety of surrounding vehicles. In this case, it is believed that the driver is cooperative.
However, some vehicles OBU are designed in such a way that they control the vehicle in severe
safety-related conditions.
4) The discussion of IEEE 802.11p MAC in Section III-B: with the EDCA priority-based mechanism, a
higher priority packet can be transmitted earlier within the node level due to the shor tAIFS assigned to
the class. However, there is still external collision, e.g., with a lower priority packet from another node.
Since the nodes are not prioritized, it is questionable to me how QoS can be guaranteed with such a
design. Some discussions or performance evaluations would be helpful to clarify this issue.
Thank you for your feedback and comments and please allow us to clarify. The scheduling of the
prioritized data packet transmissions on an internal level is performed by the Tiered Contention
Multiple Access (TCMA) protocol, which is a CSMA/CA protocol which uses shorter AIFS for
higher priority data packets. It is true that external collision take place when different packets
from different nodes are granted to the same Transmission Opportunity (TxOP). However, in this
case, colliding nodes engage in a backoff procedure as described in the Distributed Coordination
Function (DCF) of the IEEE 802.11a protocol, and they will have to later contend for channel
access. Having said the above, a discussion of the performance of the EDCA function adapted in
the IEEE 802.11p standard is necessary. Therefore, in our revision, we present 2 papers that address
this particular goal (first 2 paragraphs of Section III.C1). Both studies show that the QoS cannot
be guaranteed for lower-priority ACs. Moreover, we also investigate an external packet collision
and how to resolve such collisions. Several previous studies have proposed packet retransmission
for this purpose. We did present 3 studies that suggest the latter mechanism for external packet
collision resolution.(last 2 paragraphs of Section III.C1)
5) Although several application scenarios are provided to motivate the protocols and the illustrate
the challenges in vehicular networks, it would helpful to provide more rigorous examples (theoretical,
simulation, or measurement) to clearly illustrate what are the challenges in such networks with respect
to network/communication related requirements.
We highly appreciate this very constructive comment from the reviewer. We have included in
our revision several studies that provide more theoretical, simulation, as well as real field-test
observations of channel access in vehicular networks. The reviewer is kindly invited to go over
sections III.C1, III.C2, IV.D1, IV.D2, and IV.D3 in the presently submitted revision.
6) In the review of related literature (e.g., in Section IV-D), it would be good to introduce some structure

to organize the related papers, and provide some qualitative/quantitative comparisons/classifications.

Thank you for attracting our attention to this issue. Indeed, the comment is extremely important
and valuable. We have organized section IV.D and subdivided it into 4 subsections for the readers
convenience. Each subsection surveys a collection of papers that share a certain goal. Furthermore,
the last subsection provides a comparison between the discussed papers. The reviewer is invited to
go over these changes and give us his feedback.
7) Some discussion of business model (in addition to technical pros and cons) would be good. For
example, any motivation for service providers to use LTE rather than 802.11p?
Thank you for highlighting this issue. We have added, in the beginning of section VI.B, a paragraph that motivates LTEs deployment rather than IEEE 802.11p. Furthermore, Table V discusses
the technical, practical, as well as business-related advantages of LTE over WAVE standards. We
also mention the limitations of LTE applicability in vehicular networks at the end of the same
section (VI.B).
8) For the comparison of radios in Fig. 13, the sensing component is missing for cognitive radio.
Thank you for pointing out this issue and allowing us to better explain this figure. The sensing of
unused spectrum is the property of the cognitive radio, which is, a hardware component. Therefore,
the sensing component in Figure 13 is integrated in the hardware component.
9) Typos:
Throughout the paper, remove the comma before a citation. That is, ... networks, [2]. ==... networks
[2].
Throughout the paper, add a comma after e.g. That is, e.g. navigation ... == e.g., navigation ...
Page 2, Left, Line 43, ideated?
Several places in the paper: the remaining of ... == the remaining part of ...
The text in Fig. 2 is garbled.
Page 5, right, Line 51: such photos == such as photos
Page 6, Line 6: a adaptation == an adaptation
Thank you. Fixed.
We thank the reviewer for pointing out the existence of the above issues. We also thank him for
his constructive and essential feedback as well as for his time and effort in thoroughly reading our
manuscript. We hope that he finds our revised letter satisfactory.

Reviewer #2
1) Packet loss recovery: there are recent works on how to use network coding to recover lost packets
in vehicular safety communications, which providers some useful direction for research
Thank you for raising this point. Packet loss recovery is indeed a good suggestion to resolve
external packet collisions. We have dedicated the last 2 paragraphs of section III.C1 to discuss
packet loss recovery and its usefulness in providing efficient cooperative driver assistance by using
network coding. Network coding, being an in-network data-processing technique, increases the
network capacity and packet throughput in vehicular networks. In our revision, we presented
several studies in this regard and showed how packet restransmission using efficient coding can
increase packet delivered ratio, and as a result, the safety and transmission efficiency can be achieved
simultaneously. The reviewer is kindly invited to check out these changes in the newly submitted
revision of the survey.
2) Modeling multi-channel operation: The paper discussed several issues with multi-channel, but it
didnt discuss the issue of selecting the interval durations for the CCH and SCH in each cycle, which
affects both safety communication reliability and the available bandwidth for non-safety.
We thank the reviewer for pointing out this issue. In our revision, we have included a subsection
(IV.D2) which discusses, in details, the studies done for efficiently selecting the duration of the CCH
and SCH intervals. We have also included the suggested paper as well as many others which handle
a similar problem. The reviewer is invited to go over section IV.D2 for verification.
3) The paper suffers from lack of focus. In particular, LTE and Cognitive Radio are out of focus making
the paper an assemble of loosely connected topics. Also there are significant introductory material on LTE
and Congnitive Radio (or dynamic spectrum sharing), which are available in other papers. The paper
would be more focused if it stayed with the MAC and multi-channel.
We thank the reviewer for pointing out this issue. In the submitted revision, we have stressed
on the fact that this survey provides the reader with an overview of all technologies exploitable in
vehicular networks. Furthermore, for each technology, we present the advantages and disadvantages
of using it in different scenarios and for various goals. Hence, the service provider has the choice
to choose the most suitable technology that fits the desired application.
Furthermore, in the submitted revision, we have cut down the introductory material in both LTE
and Cognitive radio to briefly present the physical layer and its properties so that the main focus is

on the MAC layer of these two technologies and its exploitability in vehicular networks. For further
details about the LTE and cognitive technology, the reader is referred to other manuscripts. We
kindly invite the reviewer to check these changes.
4) The paper is mostly written as describing paper by paper. It would be necessary to classify many
approaches into some small number of basic appraches and organize the sections and subsections accordingly. This would be considered as new contribution.
We thank the reviewer for this constructive comment. We have organized the literature survey
sections by subdividing them into further subsections for the readers convenience. Each subsection
surveys a collection of papers that share a certain goal. Furthermore, at the end of each section
corresponding to a certain protocol, a comparison between the discussed papers is provided. The
reviewer is invited to go over these changes and give us his feedback.
5) The paper is generally correct, but it does have some technical inaccuracies. For example, on page
11, it says that it may be possible that some vehicles stay on SCH while others transmit on CCH. However,
the standard 1609.4 (multi-channel) makes sure that vehicles switch to CCH in synchronisation (using
global clocks such as GPS clock). Therefore, if a vehicle is fitted with a standards compliant DSRC radio,
then it cannot stay on SCH when it should be switched to CCH (unless it malfunctions and tampered
with, which is a different issue)
Thank you for pointing out this issue and allowing us to better explain. We totally agree with the
reviewer concerning this raised comment. However, in the mentioned-paragraph, we are presenting
a previously-done work where the authors proposed that a subset of vehicles tune in the SCH
during the SCI, while the rest engage in V2V communications in an ad-hoc manner to exchange
safety-related applications. Furthermore, we do present a discussion on this particular approach
and question its feasibility.
6) correct the spelling from somth to smooth.: The writing style is generally good (easy to read), but it
suffers from occasional use of unusual word choice, such as fame on page 2, atrocious on page 8, etc,.
Thank you. Fixed.
We thank the reviewer for his time and valuable feedback. We highly appreciate his positive
feedback on our work and welcome all his comments. In this present revision, we have adequately
addressed the reviewers comments and we hope he finds the revised manuscript satisfying and in
a better shape.

Reviewer #3
1) The authors have covered many topics related to vehicular networking: DSRC, LTE, cognitive radio
without a unifying application or theme. While reading the paper authors have presented all the topics
without discussing in which application which wireless technology would be used or tradeoffs between
various technology or in which used case which technology should be used. I think otherwise it is hard
for a reader to get a good overview picture of why all these technologies are relevant.
We thank the reviewer for raising this very important and delicate comment. In the submitted
revision, we have presented to the user several applications along with all exploitable technologies
in vehicular networks. Furthermore, as we develop the survey, for each presented technology, we
discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using it in different scenarios and for various goals.
We believe that the unifying theme of using the described technologies is any vehicular network.
However, and based on the discussed goals and proposed solutions in previous studies, the service
provider chooses which technology to deploy in a certain scenario.
2) I notice that authors discuss a particular topic and then provide selective literature survey. But at
many places the two are not properly connected. Many times it seems authors are mostly summarizing the
papers in the literature. A good survey paper will have adequate comparison tables, figures, numerical
results etc.
We thank the reviewer for this constructive and valuable comment. We carefully addressed this
comment by creating a smooth transition between the discussion about a certain technology and the
presented studies. Truly, we have stressed on the fact that, for each topic, there exists a lot of efforts
that aim at enhancing the use of a certain technology in vehicular networks. Furthermore, at the
end of each section corresponding to a certain topic, we have included a summary-like comparison
which makes it easier for the reader to remember the work done in a certain direction as well as
our observation regarding this work. The reviewer is invited to go over these changes and give us
his feedback.
3) The authors have missed a very important reference for DSRC protocol stack: John Kenney, Dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) standards in the United States Proceeding of IEEE, 2011.
The author in the paper have discussed in great detail 802.11p MAC, PHY and 1609.4 standard. This
paper has already been cited 84 times (according to Google scholar) and is an important paper in the
DSRC standards literature. Not sure how authors missed this paper. I am concerned that because of the
existing paper there is a limited novelty in Section III. and IV. of this manuscript.

We thank the reviewer for pointing out the existence of the above issue. Indeed, the mentioned
paper is very important and discusses, in details, the IEEE 802.11p and 1609 standards. In our
revised manuscript, we provide a brief, yet concise description of the PHY and MAC sublayers of
the WAVE standards and, for further details, refer the reader to the paper: John Kenney, Dedicated
short-range communications (DSRC) standards in the United States Proceeding of IEEE, 2011. We
kindly invite the reviewer to check out the changes in the newly submitted revision of the original
manuscript.
4) The discussion provided on real field test is very limited in Section III.C2. Various projects have
taken place in US, EU and Japan and should be adequately covered in the paper.
We thank the reviewer for highlighting this issue. As a result of this constructive comment, we have
carefully addressed many realistic field-test experiments that aim at evaluating the performance of
IEEE 802.11p-based communications. As a matter of fact, 5 more projects were covered (in addition
to the 4 others previously explored). The reviewer is kindly invited to go over the updated section
and give us his feedback.
5) The authors have discussed LTEs role for vehicular networking but have failed to discuss device
to device communications. Device to Device communications would be a very crucial feature in enabling
LTE for vehicular use and should be part of a survey paper on this topic.
We thank the reviewer for pointing out this issue. Device to device communication is a key feature
in LTE, and, in our revised version, we addressed this notion by presenting the work of 3 recent
studies exploiting this aspect of LTE in vehicular environments. The reviewer is invited to go over
section VI.C for further details.
6) The authors have mentioned in Section VI On a microscopic scale, the IEEE 802.11ps EDCA
prioritybased mechanism suffers from several loopholes rendering it often prone to failure in ensuring
fair access to all of a nodes internal AC queues. This is especially true in cases where nodes experience
heavy high-priority data traffic. Can authors have specify practical examples of the cases where nodes
will experience heavy truly high priority traffic data? Note that periodic beacon messages will go on
lower priority and to me heavy high priority data seems highly unlikely.
Thank you for raising this important issue and granting us the chance to further explain this
idea. Since the EDCA priority-based mechanism gives advantage for high priority access categories,
it is most likely that, in a medium-to-high traffic intensity network, a specific node may not be
able to use the spectrum frequently. As a result, high-priority traffic will internally accumlate in
high-priority AC queues making it even less probable for a low-priority packet to be released from

this specific node. Hence, this mechanism is prone to failure in ensuring fair access to all of a
nodes internal AC queues.
We are grateful for your time and effort in reading our manuscript and providing us with your constructive
feedback and comments. We addressed all of your concerns and we invite you to go over the newly revised
version of our survey and provide us with your feedback.

Reviewer #4
The rationale behind the network classification presented in Figure 1 must be better explained. For
instance, what do the authors mean by legacy network? Also, what are the meaning of networking and
overlay words in this figure? In order to make this classification more clear, the authors should give some
examples of the mentioned operational environment differences, characteristics and requirements of these
three classes of networks.
Thank you for highlighting this issue and allowing us to better explain. In our revised submission,
Figure 1 was better clarified and more examples were provided so that this newly emerging
classification of wireless networks is better understood. We kindly invite the reviewer to check
out the changes and provide us with his feeback.
We thank the reviewer for his time and effort in reviewing our survey. We appreciate his positive
feedback on our work and welcome his comments. We hope our revised submission meets the
reviewers expectations.