Architecture analysis and design for 802.11p/cellular-V2X wireless networking with embedded cybersecurity

Automated and connected vehicles are promising to improve safety, to avoid wasting energy and time due to traffic congestion, to improve the comfort and inclusivity of mobility. An autonomous vehicle needs to know the external environment using on-board advanced sensors such as radars, lidars, videocameras, inertial sensors or by exchanging data with other smart “things” such as people (V2P), infrastructures (V2I), vehicles (V2V), smart grid (V2G) thanks to the so called vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. The IEEE 802.11p wireless technology, operating in the 5.825-5.9 GHz band (multiple channels 10-MHz wide) is the standard for vehicular DSRC (Dedicated Short-range Communication) [1]. The advantages of IEEE 802.11p are the direct point-to-point communication model, the low latency (less than 100 ms for low vehicle densities [2]), and the physical separation from the crowded sub 5.8 GHz bands of other WLAN, Bluetooth, LTE services. The inherent short-range characteristic, the lack of infrastructures and the congestion problems are the 802.11p drawbacks. To exploit the existing cellular-communication infrastructure, particularly for V2P and V2I, the support of LTE communication technology, and in near future of 5G, is also needed. To this aim, we are developing a hybrid hardware/software architecture, which aims at implementing both 802.11p and 4G LTE/5G V2X connections [3]. The proposed architecture foresees separate transceivers for the RF front-end, and signal up/down-conversion, according to 802.11p and 4G LTE (then 5G) standards and a common baseband processing platform. The baseband processing platform will be developed using an Intel GO platform [4], which includes an Intel Atom C3000 processor, an ASIL-D Aurix 32-bit microcontroller, and an ARRIA-10 FPGA accelerator. The baseband platform will implement in real-time identification and security algorithms being cyber-security the main issue when connecting vehicles to the network. To this aim, the macrocell for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), we proposed in [6] will be ported on the FPGA co-processor of the Intel Go platform. Instead, the RF transceivers will be designed as custom ICs, starting from the already-frozen 802.11p standard, and then designing the 4G LTE/5G transceiver. A transistor-level implementation of the 802.11p RX blocks has been done and a simulation model has been created (using ADS at circuit-level and Simulink at architecture-level) including a model of the transmitter, which has a 23 dBm 1dBcP output power. The simulation model considers channel impairments and interferences typical of vehicle scenarios. Fig. 2 shows, for example, the received constellations at 100 m and 750 m using the designed transceiver in case a QPSK modulation scheme with root-raised cosine shaping filter is used. Fig. 3 shows the % Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) vs. connection distance. An EVM up to 20% is easily corrected through channel coding techniques implemented in the baseband platform.