Effective PSCCH Searching for 5G-NR V2X Sidelink Communications

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) are essential for increasing road safety and to make road transport more efficient, sustainable, and environmentally friendly. The implementation of C-ITS technology is only possible through the connectivity of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X), which allows the interconnection of vehicles in a network and with road support infrastructure. However, real-time systems require efficient signal processing in order to respond within the necessary time. Some of this processing is related to searching the Physical Sidelink Control Channel (PSCCH), where a blind algorithm is commonly used. However, this algorithm is quite inefficient to searching the PSCCH, since all the processing should be completed several times before successful decoding it. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to design a more efficient algorithm to search/decode the PSCCH. In the proposed algorithm, we firstly compute all the correlations between the received signal and the Demodulation Reference Signal (DMRS), and the remaining conventional processing to decode the PSCCH is only performed over the subchannels with higher correlation, which leads to a strong complexity reduction. The proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared with the conventional blind algorithm. The results have shown a significant performance improvement in terms of runtime.