A real-time MIMO channel sounder for vehicle-to-vehicle propagation channel at 5.9 GHz

This paper introduces a real-time multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) channel sounder to measure the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) propagation channel at 5.9 GHz. Compared to the existing V2V channel sounders, our design emphasizes on improving the stability of the setup and increasing the MIMO snapshot rate. The system stability allows us to develop a high resolution parameter extraction algorithm for the data analysis, which jointly estimates parameters of multipath components such as time-of-arrival, direction of departure, direction of arrival and Doppler shift. The second emphasis increases the maximal absolute Doppler shift to 806 Hz, which the system can estimate without ambiguity. The increased snapshot rate also provides a more fluent representation of the channel dynamics. We verify the design of the channel sounder with actual V2V channel measurements. Results suggest that 80 percent of the sample snapshots have a diffuse power ratio less than 20 percent and the extracted dominant specular paths match well with the environment and dynamics of the measurement.