Evaluating Automotive Antennas for Cellular Radio Communications

Cellular connectivity plays an important role for the future development of automated and connected driving and intelligent traffic. An internet connection based on a 5G network can offer new services as entertainment (media streaming) or traffic information for improved navigation and cruising. Development and testing automotive antenna designs is time consuming and expensive. An open question is the evaluation of different antennas within a realistic environment. To fill this gap and facilitate optimal antenna design we introduce three scoring indicators to compare automotive antennas for cellular mobile communications and estimate their performance. This approach can be applied both to measured data and simulation results. The indicators help to make decisions on the type of integrated antenna by considering throughput as well as network coverage.