Combined LTE and IEEE 802.11p antenna for vehicular applications

Vehicles may contain multiple antennas for different applications. Among all of them, Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2X) is one of the most recent applications. This new technology focuses on traffic safety and traffic efficiency. In this paper we present a new compact antenna module suitable for vehicular applications. This module could be easily integrated into the rear-spoiler on a vehicle. The module consists of two identical monopoles for V2X applications based on the IEEE 802.11p standard and two identical printed inverted F-antennas for Long-Term Evolution (LTE) communications. The evaluation of the proposed module is done by analyzing the simulated and measured antenna S-parameters, antenna efficiencies, radiation patterns, as well as by calculating the diversity performance. The results show that the antennas are well matched and well isolated for both LTE and V2X and exhibits a radiation pattern close to the desired omnidirectional in the horizontal plane for V2X. The two LTE antennas have radiation patterns that complement each other ensuring an omnidirectional coverage by combination. Furthermore the module presents good radiation efficiency for both LTE and V2X.