Measurement-based geometrical characterisation of the vehicle-to-vulnerable-road-user communication channel

• Published in: IET microwaves, antennas & propagation antennas & propagation, 2020-11, Vol.14 (14), p.1700-1710
• Main Authors: Rashdan, Ibrahim, Ponte Müller, Fabian de, Sand, Stephan, Jost, Thomas, Caire, Giuseppe
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: accident prone scenarios; accidents; accurate V2VRU channel model; critical accident scenarios; direction‐of‐arrival estimation; double bounce reflections; estimated time‐variant channel impulse response; extensive wideband single‐input; frequency 5.2 GHz; measurement‐based geometrical characterisation; multipath channels; multipath component distance approach; parked vehicles; propagation environment; reliable communications system; road safety; single bounce reflections; Special Section: Selected papers from the 13th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP 2019) conference; specular MPCs; specular multipath components; time‐varying channels; transient response; urban environments; vehicle‐to‐vulnerable‐road‐user communication channel; Vehicle‐to‐vulnerable‐road‐user communications; vulnerable road users; wireless channels
• ISSN: 1751-8725; 1751-8733
• DOI: 10.1049/iet-map.2019.0949

Vehicle-to-vulnerable-road-user (V2VRU) communications have the ability to provide $360^\circ $360° of awareness to both vehicles and vulnerable road users to prevent accidents. An accurate V2VRU channel model in critical accident scenarios is essential to develop a reliable communications system. Therefore, extensive wideband single-input and single-output channel measurement campaigns at 5.2 GHz were carried out in open-field and urban environments. Accident prone scenarios between a vehicle and a cyclist as well as between a vehicle and a pedestrian are considered. In this study, locations of the scatterers in the propagation environment are estimated. The authors propose a method to extract specular multipath components (MPCs) from the estimated time-variant channel impulse response based on the density of neighbouring MPCs. The specular MPCs are then tracked using a novel tracking algorithm based on the multipath component distance approach. Each path is then related to a physical scatterer in the propagation environment by employing a joint delay-Doppler estimation. According to the results, single and double bounce reflections from buildings and parked vehicles are identified in line-of-sight (LoS) situation. In non-LoS(NLoS) situation, scattering from nearby trees as well as reflections from traffic signs and lampposts beneath the trees canopy are identified.