Narrow-Beam Channel Measurements and Characterization in Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Scenarios for 5G-V2X Communications

Fifth generation new radio vehicle-to-everything (5G-V2X) communication is an emerging technology to support advanced use cases and higher automation levels in Internet of Vehicles. A comprehensive and accurate knowledge of narrow-beam channels plays a crucial role in the utilization of the 5G-V2X technique. This paper focuses on measurement and characterization of vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) narrow-beam channel. A flexible narrow-beam channel measurement system using a phased-array antenna is designed, and is employed to perform a series of 3.35 GHz channel measurements with different beam widths in highway primary road and auxiliary road. Based on the collected data, the fading characteristics of V2I narrow-beam channel including path loss, shadow fading and K-factor are extracted, analyzed and then modeled. Then, the V2I narrow-beam channel dispersion in time-frequency-space domain is characterized, and the statistical models of root-mean-square (RMS) delay spread, RMS Doppler spread and RMS angular spread are proposed. In addition, the V2I narrow-beam channel nonstationarity is discussed in terms of the stationarity interval and birth-death process of multipath components, and results of the Markov chain model with parameters like state transition probability matrix and steady-state probability are reported. The results can contribute to the design and evaluation of 5G-V2X technology.