Impact of Dust and Sand on 5G Communications for Connected Vehicles Applications

Recent research activities are focused on improving Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication (V2V) based on the 5G Technology. V2V applications are important because they are expected to reduce the risk of accidents up to 80%, enhance traffic management, mitigate congestion, and optimize fuel consumption. Typical autonomous vehicle applications require a high bandwidth transmission channel, so the 5G communication channel might be a reliable solution to support this technology. The dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), characterized by a frequency bandwidth of 5.9 GHz, were used as vehicular connectivity with bandwidth up to 200 mb/s and limited capacity, and it is here utilized for comparison to 5G. The 5G band can support connected autonomous vehicles with higher data rates and larger bandwidth. The 5G communication channel is suitable for vehicular connectivity since it has a very high bandwidth in the millimeter waves spectrum range. The quality of 5G wireless communication channels between connected vehicles is affected by weather conditions such as rain, snow, fog, dust, and sand. In this paper, the effect of dust and sand on the propagation of millimeter waves is presented. The effect of dust and sand on the communication path loss of DSRC and 5G frequency band is investigated in the case of Urban area and Highway condition. Results show that the attenuation caused by dust and sand depends on the particle size of sand,frequency of propagating wave, and concentration of dust. Finally, a new model of link margin is proposed to estimate the effect of dust and sand on DSRC (5.9 GHz) and 5G (28 GHz-73.5 GHz) communication path loss.