Effects of car body on radiation pattern of car antenna mounted on side mirror for inter-vehicle communications

Recently, the inter-vehicle communication systems have been proposed for the prevention of car crash. By the way, a radiation pattern of car antenna is changed by effects of car body and antenna positions. Therefore, it is important to know the influence of car body and antenna positions on radio wave propagation characteristics. In the numerical simulation, from a viewpoint of the reduction of computational cost, it is interested to consider a simplified car model that can obtain reasonable numerical results. In this paper, effects of car body on radiation pattern of car antenna mounted on a side mirror for inter-vehicle communications are investigated. As a first step in this work, both strict and simplified models of car body are considered. As the numerical simulation method, the FDTD method is used.