A TDD-TCDMA radio interface at millimetre waves for ITS applications

Within the context of third generation personal communication systems (UMTS, Universal Mobile Telecommunication System, or IMT-2000, International Mobile Telecommunications), a lot of research was carried out in the last years to design suitable interfaces for mobile and personal communications. In this paper the possibility to use for ITS (intelligent transportation systems) applications, such as inter-vehicle communications in highway environments, the TDD-TCDMA radio interface standardised within the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standard Institute) for third generation personal communication systems (UTRA, the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access), is investigated. More precisely, a frequency shifted version of the TDD-TCDMA interface at 60 GHz is evaluated, since this frequency band was formerly considered for ITS applications. By estimating the channel characteristics through ray tracing, and evaluating the bit error rate by means of a link-level simulation approach, we show that the TDD-TCDMA concept developed within UTRA is feasible for the application under consideration.