“Virtual Drive” physical layer simulations for Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication

Future mobile communications, in the mean of Car-to-Car (C2C), Car-to-Infrastructure (C2I) or Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, will make use of multiple antenna systems like diversity or MIMO. Especially in multiple antenna systems finding the optimal antenna configuration in order to ensure the best performance is a very difficult task. Presently antennas in mobile communications systems, especially in cars, are selected in a rather expensive and time consuming test-drives, if at all. This will not be technically possible and affordable for multiple antenna systems in the future. Here a solution for this problem is demonstrated defined as Virtual Drive. In the Virtual Drive the quality of the antenna system is determined by simulating the mobile, driving through the EM-fields radiated from the transmitter. The multi-path propagation from the transmitter is calculated by a 3D ray-tracing tool, which is based on the theory of geometrical optics (GO) and the Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD). The combination of both yields a “virtual drive” through any scenario and allows optimization of antenna configurations without extensive measurement campaigns and without prototyping all configurations to be investigated. Additionally Virtual Drive provides a perfect repeatability of the testing environment.