Radio channel properties for vehicular communication: Merging lanes versus urban intersections

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is a challenging but fast-growing technology. It has the potential to enhance road safety by helping the driver to avoid collisions during basic maneuvers such as crossing street intersections, changing lanes, merging on a highway, and driving safely in blind turns. The significance of V2V safety applications increases further where the visual line-of-sight (LOS) is unavailable because of buildings, roadside sound berms, or small hills at an intersection point of two or more roads intersecting at a certain angle, e.g., merging lanes, the entrance or exit ramps on a highway, or four-way street intersections. The reliability of V2V safety applications, which use IEEE 802.11p [1] as the underlying communication technology, highly depends on the quality of the communication link, which relies on the properties of the propagation channel. Therefore, understanding the properties of the propagation channel becomes extremely important.