Artificial Wideband Multi User Channels for Rural High Speed Vehicle to Vehicle Links

Long haul transport can be considered an obvious deployment scenario for communication between vehicles travelling in convoy, where environments will be comparable to that of a rural highway. Therefore this paper addresses antenna array techniques applicable to such circumstances, which provide little scattering to the propagation channel and little support for diversity. Only beamforming is realistically suited to increase the capacity in the vehicle to vehicle link. However, the possibility to enable multi user channels is limited in such environments since the propagation channels are highly correlated when more than two vehicle to vehicle links are in close proximity. The deliberate introduction of delay spread through wide spaced and combined multiple antenna topology thus creating an artificial wideband fading channel is proposed in this paper, which results in de-correlated vehicle to vehicle links. Measurements and experimental results are presented that demonstrate the means by which uncorrelated wideband channels between separate vehicle to vehicle links can be formed to enable multi user capabilities specific to vehicles on a rural highway.