Vehicle-to-Vehicle Channel Models with Large Vehicle Obstructions

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication is an enabler for improved traffic safety and congestion control. As for any wireless system the ultimate performance limit is determined by the propagation channel. A particular point of interest is the shadowing effect of large vehicles such as trucks and buses, as this might affect the communication range significantly. In this paper we present measurement results and model the propagation channel in which a bus acts as a shadowing object between two passenger cars. The measurement setup is based on a WARP FPGA software radio as transmitter, and a Tektronix RSA5106A real-time complex spectrum analyzer as receiver. We analyze the influence of the bus location and car separation distance on the large-scale path loss, shadowing, and small-scale fading. The main effect of the bus is that it is acting as an obstruction creating an additional 15-20 dB attenuation. A Nakagami distribution is found to describe the statistics of the small-scale fading, by using Akaike's Information Criterion and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The distance-dependency of the path loss is analyzed, and a stochastic model is developed to reflect the impact.