Vehicular safety communication at intersections: Buildings, Non-Line-Of-Sight and representative scenarios

Vehicular Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) promises to reduce accidents by enabling assistance systems such as cross-traffic assistance. This application needs movement information from vehicles that are potentially in Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) due to buildings at intersection corners. The amount of NLOS is determined by the placements of buildings. From another point of view, buildings influence the DSRC wireless channel by creating radio signal reflections and diffraction. Here, existing NLOS path-loss models for cellular communication with below roof-top base stations hint that the spatial placement of buildings has influence on the NLOS reception quality. This paper analyzes building positioning in the City of Munich with respect to DSRC. In a first step, it is investigated how much the line-of-sight is blocked by buildings. In a second step, the location of buildings is abstracted and the resulting data clustered to find a set of representative buildingposition scenarios. The presented scenario knowledge can be used in future research to configure meaningful simulations that investigate the radio channel at intersections under load and to select representative intersections for radio propagation field tests.