An Analysis of Differences between the Evolving United States and European Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) Systems

This paper will present differences between Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Roadside communication systems evolving in North America and in Europe. Over the past years, the United States has allocated a frequency band to support such communications while European governments have funded many research programs but have yet to allocate suitable frequencies. Each of these regions faces unique political challenges and has a different approach to designing similar systems. North American research has focused on use case development and supported standards development through the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). European research has focused on components such as networking and security and supported standards through a new organization, the Car2Car Communications Consortium, while monitoring the IEEE and SAE developments. Despite these differences, both societies will benefit in terms of lower cost and better quality if the two systems share common software and hardware elements.