Path Loss and Shadowing Modeling for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications in Terrestrial TV Band

Vehicle platooning is considered as one of the key use cases for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. However, its benefits can be realized only with highly reliable wireless transmission. As the 5.9 GHz frequency band used for V2V suffers from high congestion, in this article, we consider the use of the terrestrial TV frequencies for intra-platoon communications. In order to be able to evaluate the potential of the new bands fully, propagation models for V2V communications at such frequencies are needed. Therefore, this article reports new V2V propagation measurements and their modeling results. In particular, we propose a double slope double shadowing model as the most accurate one, based on a comparison of various models using the Bayesian information criteria. We also investigate the space–time autocorrelation properties of shadowing, which turned out to be dependent on the speed of vehicles. The proposed path loss and shadowing model differs from the ones proposed for the 5.9 GHz band; mostly, in favor of the TV band, as shown by, e.g., no statistically significant impact of a blocking car.