Performance evaluation of vehicle-roadside communication systems in shadowing and multipath fading environments

Vehicle-roadside communication systems supporting road traffic management applications will be installed in very different environments (e.g. motorway for automatic fee collection or an urban crossing for parking management). The systems therefore will have to cope with varying characteristics of the physical channel; in particular shadowing and multipath fading effects as well as multiaccess interference. The concept of the performance evaluation of dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) systems in a realistically modelled environment using the stochastic simulation tool SIMCO3++ is introduced. In order to evaluate the impact of shadowing and multipath fading effects, techniques for accurate modelling of the traffic flow as well as a channel model, which takes into account the specific influences of traffic situations and vehicle types on the link quality are developed and presented. The system configurations are analysed taking into account the emerging CEN prENV DSRC standard in Europe and the implementation of two typical applications: automatic fee collection and dynamic route guidance. Finally, based on validated traffic scenarios from motorways in Germany and the Netherlands, the results of performance evaluations analysing the impact of shadowing effects using different antenna configurations are presented.