In-Tunnel Vehicular Radio Channel Characterization

Inside a tunnel, electromagnetic wave propagation differs strongly from the well understood "open-air" situation. The characterization of the tunnel environment is crucial for deploying vehicular communication systems. In this paper we evaluate vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) radio channel measurements inside a tunnel. We estimate the time-varying root mean square (rms) delay and Doppler spreads, as well as the excess delay and the maximum Doppler dispersion. The fading process in V2V communications is inherently non-stationary. Hence, we characterize the stationarity time, for which we can consider the fading process to be wide sense stationary. We show that the spreads, excess delay, and maximum Doppler dispersion are larger on average when both vehicles are inside the tunnel compared to the "open-air" situation. The temporal evolution of the stationarity time is highly influenced by the strength of time-varying multipath components and the distance between vehicles. Furthermore, we show the good fit of the rms delay and Doppler spreads to a lognormal distribution, as well as for the stationarity time. From our analysis we can conclude that the IEEE 802.11p standard will be robust towards inter-symbol and inter-carrier interference inside a tunnel.