Performance Evaluation of Cooperative Communications Over Fading Channels in Vehicular Networks

This paper provides channel modeling and performance evaluation study of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) cooperative communications in urban non-line-of-sight (NLOS) multipath fading environments. The proposed model investigates three different scenarios: i) V2V communications enabled by parallel cooperative dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AaF) vehicle-relaying, ii) V2V communications enabled by dual-hop AaF road-side-unit (RSU) relaying on one link and direct V2V communications on another link, iii) V2I communications enabled by dual-hop AaF vehicle-relaying on one link and direct V2I communications on another link. We derive relevant statistics for the output signal envelope and related system performance, e.g. the level crossing rate and average fade duration for varying outage threshold. Numerical results are presented for different sets of channel parameters.