V2I mmWave Connectivity for Highway Scenarios

This paper investigates the connectivity of vehicles to road-side infrastructure (V2I) using a mmWave system at 60 GHz. Two highways in the UK were selected as virtual test drive routes. Detailed 3D geographic data of the city are incorporated into a 3D mmWave ray-tracing tool for the purpose of generating realistic channel matrices for use in an IEEE 802.11ad physical layer (PHY) simulator. The spatial and temporal multipath components of the radio channel between a road side unit (RSU) and the vehicles are modelled. Up to half million point-to-point ray tracing simulations were performed. Important parameters such as delay and angular spread for channel modelling have been extracted from the results. Statistical analysis for each route is presented. Spatial and polarimetric convolution between the multipath ray data and the appropriate beam pattern is performed in order to generate throughput predictions using a link level abstraction simulator. The throughput performance along the routes is presented for the Single Carrier (SC) transmission scheme of IEEE 802.11ad. A comparison between isotropic antennas and phased array beamforming is presented. It was found that three 60 GHz RSUs provided full coverage for a 2 km highway route. The simulation results provide a useful insight on the RSU deployment requirements.