Initial Investigation to study the Effect of Antenna Placement in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

In this paper we present an analysis of the effects of antenna placement on the radio channel properties for Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications based on measurements performed in three different propagation scenarios; highway, urban and rural. Four omni-directional antennas were mounted at four different positions: roof, bumper, left-side mirror and inside windscreen of
two standard station wagons (Volvo V70). The channel transfer functions were measured for all antenna combinations with a wideband MIMO channel sounder. The results from this initial analysis show that the antenna mounted on the left-side mirror outperforms other antennas when vehicles are moving in convoy and are aligned well to each other. Whereas, if the TX and
RX are moving in opposite direction, i.e., towards each other, bumper antenna shows good performance as long as LOS is available in between the antenna elements. In total some kind of diversity arrangement with complementary antennas seems to be the preferred solution, to decrease the effect of shadowing.