Virtual Drive Testing of Adaptive Antenna Systems in Dynamic Propagation Scenarios for Vehicle Communications

Abstract

Virtual drive testing (VDT) has gained great interest from both industry and academia, owing to its promise to replay field trials in a controllable laboratory condition. VDT is especially appealing for vehicle communication scenarios, where actual field trials can be difficult to carry out in practice. Research work on VDT of adaptive antenna systems in dynamic propagation scenarios has been limited, mainly due to high VDT setup cost and lack of efficient dynamic propagation channel models. In this paper, we propose to jointly emulate adaptive antennas (i.e. beamformers) and radio channels in the radio channel emulator to reduce the VDT setup cost. A simple dynamic propagation channel framework, which is based on linear interpolation of propagation parameters of the stationary channel models, is also presented. We further experimentally evaluate the beamformer capability (i.e. beam tracking and null steering) in dynamic line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS scenarios in the proposed cost-effective conducted VDT setups. The simulation and measurement results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the beam tracking and nulling steering algorithms in dynamic propagation conditions in the presence of interfering signal. The proposed setup and dynamic channel modeling framework are valuable for the VDT of adaptive antenna systems.