Robust Vehicular Communications for Traffic Safety---Channel Estimation and Multiantenna Schemes

Doctoral thesis, 2018

Vehicular communications, where vehicles exchange information with other vehicles or entities in the road traffic environment, is expected to be a part of the future transportation system and promises to support a plethora of applications for traffic safety and efficiency. In particular, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication promises to support numerous traffic safety applications by enabling a vehicle to broadcast its current status to all the other vehicles in its surrounding.

    Vehicular wireless channels can be highly time- and/or frequency-selective due to high mobility of the vehicles and/or large delay spreads. IEEE 802.11p has been specified as the physical layer standard for vehicular communications, where the pilots are densely concentrated at the beginning of a frame. As a consequence, accurate channel estimation in later parts of the frame becomes a challenging task. In this thesis, a solution to overcome the ill-suited pilot pattern is studied; a cross-layered scheme to insert complementary pilots into an 802.11p frame is proposed. The scheme does not require modifications to the 802.11p standard and a modified receiver can utilize the complementary pilots for accurate channel estimation in vehicular channels.

    The metallic components of present-day vehicles pose a challenge in designing antenna systems that satisfy a minimum required directive gain in the entire horizontal plane. Multiple antennas with contrasting directive gain patterns can be used to alleviate the problems due to low directive gains. A scheme that combines the output of L antennas to the input of a single-port receiver is proposed in the thesis. The combining scheme is designed to minimize the probability of a burst error, i.e., an unsuccessful decoding of K consecutive packets from a transmitter arriving in the direction of low directive gains of the individual antennas. To minimize complexity, the scheme does not estimate or use any channel state information. It is shown using measured and simulated directive gain patterns that the probability of burst errors for packets arriving in the direction of low directive gains of the individual antenna elements can be minimized.

    The enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) scheme is used in V2V communications to facilitate the sharing of allocated time-frequency resources. The packet success ratio (PSR) of the broadcast messages in the EDCA scheme depends on the number of vehicles and the packet transmission rate. The interference at a receiving vehicle increases due to multiple simultaneous transmissions when the number of vehicles grows beyond a limit, resulting in the decrease of the PSR. A receiver setup with sector antennas, where the output of each antenna can be processed separately to decode a packet, is described in the thesis with a detailed performance analysis. A significant increase in the PSR is shown in a dense vehicular scenario by using four partially overlapping sector antennas compared with a single omnidirectional antenna setup.