Novel Antenna Configurations for Wireless Broadband Vehicular Communications

In this paper, mobile WiMAX trials are analysed to investigate the vehicular down-link performance for a number of on-car antenna configurations. The directionality and optimum polarization of the vehicular antennas are shown to improve both the range and throughput of the system. These improvements are attributed to the additional directive gain, and the reduced multi-input multi-output spatial correlation that results from orthogonal polarization. The mobile-WiMAX trials cover an urban vehicular scenario using a 2x2 MIMO system configuration. Results show that the throughput can be doubled for a wide range of received SNR levels (via STBC or SM) when a pair of directional dual polarized antennas are used at the vehicle (compared to omni-directional devices).