A rigorous analysis of vehicle-to-vehicle range performance in a rural channel propagation scenario as a function of antenna type and location via simulation and field trails

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications will be an essential part of the technology in future autonomous drive decision systems. A fundamental procedure is to establish a robust communication channel between end-to-end devices. Due to the antenna placed at different positions on vehicles, the existing cellular electro-magnetic (EM) wave propagation modelling does not fit properly for V2X direct communication application. In order to figure out a feasible understanding of this problem, this paper focuses on the propagation channel analysis in a rural Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) scenario for vehicular communication with antenna position experiments at different heights. By adopting the ray-tracing algorithm, a rural scenario simulation model is built up via the use of a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) EM modelling software package, that computes the path loss received power and delay spread for a given propagation channel. Next, a real-world vehicle measurement campaign was performed to verify the simulation results. The simulated and measured receiver power was in good agreement with each other, and the results of this study considered two antenna types located at three different relative heights between the two vehicles. This research provides constructive guidance for the V2V antenna characteristics, antenna placement and vehicle communication channel analysis.