This paper presents design and experimental evaluation of a distributed autonomous multi-hop vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication system over TV white space performed in Japan. We propose the two-layer control channel model, which consists of the Zone Aware Control Channel (ZACC) and the Swarm Aware Control Channel (SACC), to establish the multi-hop network. Several vehicles construct a swarm using location information shared through ZACC, and share route and channel information, and available white space information through SACC. To evaluate the system we carried out field experiments with swarm made of three vehicles in a convoy. The vehicles observe channel occupancy via energy detection and agree on the control and the data channels autonomously. For coarse synchronization of quiet periods for sensing we use GPS driven oscillators, and introduce a time margin to accommodate for remaining drift. When a primary user is detected in any of the borrowed channels, the vehicles switch to a vacant channel without disrupting the ongoing multi-hop communication. We present the experimental results in terms of the time to establish control channel, channel switching time, delivery ratio of control message exchange, and throughput. As a result, we showed that our implementation can provide efficient and stable multi-hop V2V communication by using dynamic spectrum access (DSA) techniques
