Virtual Drive Test for Vehicle Antenna Evaluation

Drive test has been the method to evaluate the performance of the automotive antennas in urban and suburban/ rural environments. Virtual drive test (VDT) using high-frequency electromagnetic and wave-propagation simulation software can be used instead to evaluate vehicular antennas performance. This paper presents a simulation-based method for evaluating LTE automotive antenna installed on a roof of a vehicle in an urban environment with and without surrounding traffic. A full-wave method; namely, the Multi-Level Fast Multipole Method (MLFMM) is used to perform the analysis of the antenna placed on a vehicle. Whereas Ray-optical Intelligent ray tracing model (IRT) is used to evaluate the installed antenna performance, in here received power, in a non-stationary environment. The received power of the vehicle antenna with and without traffic was found to minorly disagree in a complex urban environment.