SDR-Based Channel Emulator for Vehicular Communications

Recently, there has been an increase in the development of new intelligent transportation systems. Specifically, this technology was proposed with the aim of increasing road safety and improving traffic flow management by information interchange among vehicles. In this sense, the dedicated radio short-range communication (DSRC) technology enables reliable vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. However, in order to guarantee the correct operation of the radio transmission systems, it is necessary to test the transmitter and receiver devices under controlled conditions. A channel emulator offers a fast and non-expensive solution to perform these tests. This paper presents a new non wide-sense stationary uncorrelated scattering (non-WSSUS) channel emulator for vehicle communications, which is based on software defined radios (SDR). Implementation results show that the proposed channel emulator can reproduce propagation environment corresponding to non-WSSUS channels with exactness. This will allow testing of communications systems under development using the SDR-based V2V-V2I channel emulator.