Connected Vehicle Channels: On the Consideration of Electromagnetic Scattering From Local Scatterers

Connected vehicles are highly expected to be proactive, cooperative, well-informed, and coordinated. Therefore, high-reliable connected vehicle channels are required. It is widely accepted that the local scatterers appreciably affect wireless propagation channels and connected vehicle channels have no exception. This paper presents a general and highly efficient channel modeling method where electromagnetic (EM) scattering from local scatterers is calculated separately and then combined with ray tracing (RT) results; the method is named as layered-broadband channel model (LBCM) in this study and it is of great value as it could accurately simulate scatterer-included connected vehicle channels. The idea of the LBCM was arisen by the fact that EM scattering from scatterers displays point-scattering-like behaviors. Therefore, the scattering can be parameterized with a sparse point set and then the set could be efficiently implemented in broadband RT channel simulations. In order to validate the capability of proposed LBCM, a traffic sign was first taken as a typical example of local scatterers and its EM scattering was closely studied; then an urban intersection of typical vehicle-to-vehicle scenario was selected, where detailed comparisons were carried out between an LBCM-simulated channel and measured one. The validation processes present an integration of the full-wave simulation, analytical models, and measurement; and their results strongly confirm the feasibility and reliability of the LBCM.