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

Abstract

Vehicle-to-vulnerable-road-user (V2VRU) communications have the ability to provide 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 nonLoS(NLoS) situation, scattering from nearby trees as well as reflections from traffic signs and lampposts beneath the trees canopy are identified.