Directional Analysis of Vehicle-to-Vehicle Propagation Channels

This paper presents a double directional analysis of vehicle-to-vehicle channel measurements conducted in three different traffic scenarios. Using a high-resolution algorithm, we derive channel parameters like Angle-of-Arrival (AOA), Angle-of-Departure (AOD), propagation delay and Doppler shift and identify underlying propagation mechanisms by combining these estimates with maps of the measurement sites. The results show that first-order reflections from a small number of interacting objects can account for a large part of the received signal in the absence of line-of-sight (LOS). This effect is especially pronounced in the two traffic scenarios where the road is not lined with buildings. We also found that the direction spread is low (and conversely that the antenna correlation is high) in such scenarios, which suggests that beam forming rather than diversity-based methods should be used if multiple antenna elements are used. The situation is reversed, however, in the third scenario, a narrow urban intersection, where a larger number of higher-order reflections is found to result in a higher direction spread.