Deterministic 3D Ray-Launching Millimeter Wave Channel Characterization for Vehicular Communications in Urban Environments

• Main Authors: Fidel Alejandro Rodríguez-Corbo, Leyre Azpilicueta, Mikel Celaya-Echarri, Peio Lopez-Iturri, Imanol Picallo, Francisco Falcone, Ana Vazquez Alejos
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-09-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: millimeter wave; ray tracing; vehicular communications; channel characterization
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/18/5284

The increasing demand for more sensors inside vehicles pursues the intention of making vehicles more “intelligent”. In this context, the vision of fully connected and autonomous cars is becoming more tangible and will turn into a reality in the coming years. The use of these intelligent transport systems will allow the integration of efficient performance in terms of route control, fuel consumption, and traffic administration, among others. Future vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication will require a wider bandwidth as well as lower latencies than current technologies can offer, to support high-constraint safety applications and data exhaustive information exchanges. To this end, recent investigations have proposed the adoption of the millimeter wave (mmWave) bands to achieve high throughput and low latencies. However, mmWave communications come with high constraints for implementation due to higher free-space losses, poor diffraction, poor signal penetration, among other channel impairments for these high-frequency bands. In this work, a V2X communication channel in the mmWave (28 GHz) band is analyzed by a combination of an empirical study and a deterministic simulation with an in-house 3D ray-launching algorithm. Multiple mmWave V2X links has been modeled for a complex heterogeneous urban scenario in order to capture and analyze different propagation phenomena, providing full volumetric estimation of frequency/power as well as time domain parameters. Large- and small-scale propagation parameters are obtained for a combination of different situations, taking into account the obstruction between the transceivers of vehicles of distinct sizes. These results can aid in the development of modeling techniques for the implementation of mmWave frequency bands in the vehicular context, with the capability of adapting to different scenario requirements in terms of network topology, user density, or transceiver location. The proposed methodology provides accurate wireless channel estimation within the complete volume of the scenario under analysis, considering detailed topological characteristics.