5.9Ghz car-to-car measurements

To get a feeling for how well car-to-car communication actually works on the 5.9Ghz ITS band we went on a test-drive last week. We equipped two vehicles and ran through a number of interesting scenarios such as:

• Travelling in different directions on the highway (~240 km/h relative speed)
• Driving in urban areas with multi-storey buildings
• Rural areas, especially at hilly locations/crests
• Flat areas with clear line-of-sight.
• Driving in the same direction on the highway with large trucks between transmitter and receiver
  

Although we had been expecting it, the correlation between line-of-sight and packet-reception-rate (PRR) was surprisingly clear. The picture below shows PRR as a function of location in the urban scenario. The yellow marker indicates where the transmitting vehicle was parked as we circled the block with the receiver. Green bars show locations with almost no packet-drops while just around the corner all packets are dropped. Ways of handling situations with such poor reception is the current focus of my research, the results from these preliminary test drives really emphasize the need for solutions to communication "black spots".



We are using the MatLab Google Earth toolbox to create these visualizations, highly recommended!