Performance study of LTE and mmWave in vehicle-to-network communications

A key enabler for the emerging autonomous and cooperative driving services is high-throughput and reliable Vehicle-to-Network (V2N) communication. In this respect, the millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies hold great promises because of the large available bandwidth which may provide the required link capacity. However, this potential is hindered by the challenging propagation characteristics of high-frequency channels and the dynamic topology of the vehicular scenarios, which affect the reliability of the connection. Moreover, mmWave transmissions typically leverage beamforming gain to compensate for the increased path loss experienced at high frequencies. This, however, requires fine alignment of the transmitting and receiving beams, which may be difficult in vehicular scenarios. Those limitations may undermine the performance of V2N communications and pose new challenges for proper vehicular communication design. In this paper, we study by simulation the practical feasibility of some mmWave-aware strategies to support V2N, in comparison to the traditional LTE connectivity below 6 GHz. The results show that the orchestration among different radios represents a viable solution to enable both high-capacity and robust V2N communications.