LTE-Advanced and Next Generation Wireless Networks: Channel Modelling and Propagation

Chapter 6

Vehicular Channels

Laura Bernadó¹, Nicolai Czink¹, Thomas Zemen¹, Alexander Paier, Fredrik Tufvesson², Christoph Mecklenbräuker³ and Andreas F. Molisch⁴

¹ Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien, Austria

² Lund University, Sweden

³ Vienna University of Technology, Austria

⁴ University of Southern California, USA

6.1 Introduction

Nowadays, mobility has become a need and has brought a large number of vehicles circulating on the streets. Unfortunately, it has also brought an increase in deaths on the roads, as well as an increase of CO₂ emissions, both far from ideal side effects. Communications from Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), where the infrastructure is controlled by the road operator, is envisioned to provide information about the traffic flow such that the traffic accidents rate could be reduced, and vehicles could drive in a more environmentally friendly way.

Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) supports high mobility and this makes the vehicular environment a good candidate for implementing V2V and V2I communications. However, some applications, such as hazard notification or accident mitigation, impose demanding time constraints, which are difficult to meet in cellular communication systems. Based on this consideration, ad-hoc networks are considered as the main communications technology.

The radio channel observed in V2V and V2I links is characterized by being highly time-varying and it is described through a non-stationary fading ...