Robust Connectivity With Multiple Directional Antennas for Vehicular Communications
Journal article, 2020

For critical vehicular communication services, such as traffic safety and traffic efficiency, it is advisable to design systems with robustness as the main criteria, possibly at the price of reduced peak performance and efficiency. We describe a simple, low-cost method for combining the output of L directional (i.e., not omnidirectional) antennas to the input of a single-port receiver with the aim to guarantee robustness, i.e., to minimize the probability that K consecutive packets arriving from the worst-case angle-of-arrival are decoded incorrectly. To minimize complexity, the combining network does not estimate or use channel state information. The combining network consists of L-1 analog phase shifters whose phases are affine functions of time. For a general Lłe K and when the packet error probability decays exponentially with the received SNR, the optimum slopes of the affine functions can be computed by solving an optimization problem that depends on the antenna far-field functions. We provide analytical solutions for the special case of L=2 and 3 antennas, which turns out to be independent of the antenna far-field functions and placement on a vehicle. In an experimental setup consisting of two monopole antennas mounted on the roof of a Volvo XC90, the proposed combining method is shown to give significant performance gains, compared to using any one of the antennas.

Transmitters

burst error probability

vehicular communications

Receiving antennas

Antenna accessories

directional antennas

Signal to noise ratio

Robustness

Robustness

analog combining network.

Author

Keerthi Nagalapur

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Erik Ström

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Fredrik Brännström

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Jan Carlsson

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Kristian Karlsson

RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

1524-9050 (ISSN) 1558-0016 (eISSN)

Vol. 21 12 5305-5315 8928957

Integrated Antenna Arrays

United Monolithic Semiconductors (UMS), 2016-01-01 -- 2023-12-29.

Kongsberg kommune, 2016-01-01 -- 2023-12-29.

Ericsson, 2016-01-01 -- 2023-12-29.

VINNOVA, 2016-01-01 -- 2021-12-31.

Saab, 2016-01-01 -- 2023-12-29.

Gapwaves AB, 2016-01-01 -- 2023-12-29.

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Transport

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Subject Categories

Communication Systems

Signal Processing

DOI

10.1109/TITS.2019.2956099

More information

Latest update

4/5/2022 7