Vehicle-to-X Communication and Automotive Radar

In vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, as well as in simulations of automotive radar, you usually want to include at least one moving vehicle in the simulation. Therefore, these fall in the category of time-variant scenarios. Applications of vehicle-to-X communication include vehicular networks, intelligent transportation systems, and active safety measures at intersections, see Figure 1.



Figure 1. Antenna on car (at the bottom of image) communicates with a traffic light (near the green truck).

Advanced driver assistance systems use sensors such as automotive radar. The transmitter and the receiver are connected to small antenna arrays, often mounted side by side in the front bumper.

In the process of setting up an automotive-radar simulation, both the transmitting antenna and the receiving antenna are defined to move with a vehicle. For the transmitting antenna, when specifying its location, the dialog offers the Location of antenna is time variant check box and the object group with which it moves can be specified. For the receiving antenna, the key is to specify an individual prediction point (as opposed to a prediction area or a trajectory). An individual prediction point can be specified as time variant. Figure 2 shows a typical simulation result.


Figure 2. Result of an automotive radar simulation. Transmitter and receiver move with the car, and rays are weighted by antenna patterns.

In addition to power of individual rays, Doppler shift and delay are reported for further post-processing.

A useful option for automotive-radar simulations is to import patterns of monostatic radar cross section (RCS) from Feko. This can save simulation time and improve accuracy. The complicated reflecting object in WinProp can be replaced by a simple object plus the RCS information, see Figure 3.



Figure 3. On-coming car was replaced by a simple object plus detailed monostatic RCS information from Feko.

Since monostatic RCS contains only the backscatter information, it is not suited for vehicle-to-X communication simulations.