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

Traffic Safety

Sector Antennas

All-to-all Broadcast

Channel Estimation

Cross-layer Pilot Scheme

Multiantenna Schemes

Vehicular Communications (V2X)

Room EB, EDIT building, Hörsalsvägen 11, Chalmers University of Technology
Opponent: Prof. Christoph Mecklenbräuker, Institute of Telecommunications, TU Wien, Austria

Författare

Keerthi Nagalapur

Chalmers, Elektroteknik, Kommunikation, Antenner och Optiska Nätverk

K. K. Nagalapur, E. G. Ström, F. Brännström, J. Carlsson, and K. Karlsson, "Robust connectivity with multiple directional antennas for vehicular communications," submitted to IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, May 2018

On Channel Estimation for 802.11p in Highly Time-Varying Vehicular Channels

IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 10-14 June 2014,; (2014)p. 5659--5664-

Paper i proceeding

An 802.11p Cross-Layered Pilot Scheme for Time- and Frequency-Varying Channels and Its Hardware Implementation

IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology,; Vol. 65(2016)p. 3917-3928

Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift

K. K. Nagalapur, F. Brännström, and E. G. Ström, "Performance analysis of receivers using sector antennas for broadcast vehicular communications," submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications, May 2018

“Here I am,” says my car!

Safety of road passengers depends to a large extent on drivers' attentiveness and their ability to overcome a dangerous situation. By enabling road vehicles to communicate with each other and sense their immediate surroundings, additional support can be provided to the drivers to prevent fatal accidents. The communication between the vehicles is achieved by allowing the vehicles to broadcast “Here I am” status messages containing their position, velocity, and other relevant information. The vehicles combine the information in the “Here I am” messages from other vehicles with their own to draw a picture of the current road traffic and anticipate any impending danger to prevent an accident. The exchange of the status messages also enables numerous road traffic applications apart from improving the traffic safety.

    The advantages of enabling the vehicles to exchange status messages come with the challenges of designing wireless communication systems that support reliable communications for safety critical traffic applications. The high mobility of the vehicles, large number of vehicles sharing the same resources for communications, and the metallic nature of today's vehicles present several challenges in achieving reliable and robust communications between vehicles. In this thesis, a few solutions to overcome some of the challenges are presented.

Styrkeområden

Informations- och kommunikationsteknik

Ämneskategorier

Telekommunikation

Kommunikationssystem

Signalbehandling

ISBN

978-91-7597-743-0

Doktorsavhandlingar vid Chalmers tekniska högskola. Ny serie: 4424

Utgivare

Chalmers

Room EB, EDIT building, Hörsalsvägen 11, Chalmers University of Technology

Opponent: Prof. Christoph Mecklenbräuker, Institute of Telecommunications, TU Wien, Austria

Mer information

Senast uppdaterat

2018-05-17