Combination of Measurement and Simulation for Fast Virtual Drive Testing

Virtual Drive Test (VDT) is an area of great interest for both scientific research and industry. The objective of VDT is to emulate a real-world communication testing by approximation of defined conditions. VDT can be performed in measurement facilities with over-the-air approaches and channel emulation techniques [1] [2], by simulation-based software-in-the-loop tests [3] or by combining measurement and simulation [4]. For all possible solutions, the challenge of the scientific community is to look for an automated, controllable, repeatable, and reliable procedure, which can considerably reduce testing time and costs. In this paper we present a new VDT technique to evaluate the V2X communications performances based on the combination of measurement and simulation. In particular, the radiation performance of a DUT representing the antenna under test installed on a vehicle is tested in a measurement facility, the radiation pattern (vehicle equipped by the antenna) is integrated in a simulation of a realistic scenario to reproduce a real-world communication testing. The accuracy of the method is validated by comparison with results of measured data from Field Operational Test (FoT) of LTE links [5] [6].