A Measurement-Based Multilink Shadowing Model for V2V Network Simulations of Highway Scenarios

Shadowing from vehicles can significantly degrade the performance of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication in multilink systems, e.g., vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). It is, thus, important to characterize and model the influence of common shadowing objects like cars properly when designing these VANETs. Despite the fact that for multilink systems it is essential to model the joint effects on the different links, the multilink shadowing effects of V2V channels on VANET simulations are not yet well understood. In this paper, we present a measurement-based analysis of multilink shadowing effects in a V2V communication system with cars as blocking objects. In particular, we analyze, characterize, and model the large scale fading, both regarding the autocorrelation and the joint multilink cross-correlation process, for communication at 5.9 GHz between four cars in a highway convoy scenario. The results show that it is essential to separate the instantaneous propagation condition into line-of-sight (LOS) and obstructed LOS (OLOS), by other cars, and then apply an appropriate pathloss model for each of the two cases. The choice of the pathloss model not only influences the autocorrelation but also changes the cross correlation of the large scale fading process between different links. By this, we conclude that it is important that VANET simulators should use geometry-based models, that distinguish between LOS and OLOS communication. Otherwise, the VANET simulators need to consider the cross correlation between different communication links to achieve results close to reality.