Measurement-based analysis of relaying performance for vehicle-to-vehicle communications with large vehicle obstructions

It has been widely recognized that relaying is an important method for increasing the reliability and spectral efficiency of communications systems, and it is thus helpful for improving the performance of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems. However, designing and evaluating V2V relay networks require understanding the effect of shadowing, as this critically impacts the performance of the relay system. Even though the theoretic performances of various relaying schemes have been well investigated, there is a lack of empirical test that incorporates realistic shadowing effects. In this paper, we analyze the performance of relaying transmission in V2V scenarios based on measurements in scenarios where shadowing occurs through large vehicles such as buses. We investigate several potential locations for the relay nodes, and the measurements are performed with two static transmitters (TX) and one dynamic receiver (RX). Outage probabilities of several relaying schemes such as multi-hop decode-and-forward, multi-hop amplify-and-forward, and diversity-amplify-and-forward are estimated and discussed based on the measured instantaneous end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). It is found that: (i) shadowing effect caused by the bus between V2V line-of-sight (LOS) links increases the outage probability for the non-LOS (NLOS) direct transmission; (ii) using relay node on the bus roof can significantly improve transmission, however, a strong shadowing effect may reduces the acceptable communication distance of relaying scheme; and (iii) the diversity-amplify-and-forward relaying scheme generally has the best performance. Our results can be used to design a relay system for V2V communications.