Automakers are increasingly employing wireless communications technologies into vehicles, which are expected to be one of the primary tools to improve traffic flow and traffic safety. Anticipating a significant increase in the accompanying spectrum and capacity requirements, in this paper, we speculate about using dynamic spectrum access in general, and TV white space in particular for vehicular communications. To this end, we describe the concept, design, general architecture and operation principles of a vehicle-to-vehicle communications system over TV white space. This system makes dual use of a geolocation database and spectrum sensing to understand spectrum vacancies. In this architecture, whenever a database query result is available, that information is prioritized over sensing results and when the database access is disrupted, vehicles rely on the spectrum sensing results. After describing the general concepts, we numerically analyze and evaluate the benefits of using proxy vehicles for geolocation database access. Finally, we present the middleware-centric implementation and field test results of a multi-hop vehicle-to-vehicle communications system over the licensed TV-band. We present results regarding multi-hop throughput, delay, jitter, channel switching and database access latencies. This study complements our previous work which described spectrum sensing based vehicle-to-vehicle communications design and testing.
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