Performance considerations for automotive antenna equipment in vehicle-to-vehicle communications

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications systems focus on the improvement of driver safety and traffic efficiency using the recently designated frequency bands in the 5.9GHz range in Europe. Due to the time-frequency selective fading behaviour of the vehicular communication channel, antenna-related effects impacted by the vehicular mounting position and mutual coupling play an integral role in the performance of V2V communications. This paper focuses on the analysis of characteristic antenna effects that are subject to vehicular mounting. Example multi-element antenna (MEA) topologies are considered to improve the reliability of the wireless link by diversity combining in order to meet the stringent requirements of real-time communications.