Evaluation of the V2V channel and diversity potential for platooning trucks

This paper gives results from Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication field tests in a platoon consisting of four trucks. During these tests it was assumed that large vehicles such as trucks need multiple antennas to overcome shadowing and obstruction caused by the vehicle itself, trailers and other trucks in the platoon. Therefore, in the experiments the vehicles had one antenna in each side-view mirror, and each antenna was connected to an IEEE 802.11p radio transmitting at 5.9 GHz according to the ETSI ITS-G5 standard. The purpose of the tests was to estimate the V2V channel for trucks participating in a platoon and to investigate the potential of diversity for such cooperative application. Three communication schemes for diversity were evaluated: receive diversity, transmit diversity, and transmit in combination with receive diversity. Studies were performed for two different antenna configurations in three different environments (rural, highway and tunnel).