Measurement and Analysis of Wireless Channel Impairments in DSRC Vehicular Communications

We present a GPS-enabled channel sounding platform for measuring both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to- roadside wireless channels. This platform was used to conduct an extensive field measurement campaign involving vehicular wireless channels across a wide variety of speeds and line-of-sight conditions. From the data, we present statistical characterizations of several classes of these channels at 5.9 GHz. This analysis suggests that while the proposed DSRC standard may account for Doppler and delay spreads in vehicular channels, large packets may face higher error rates due to time-varying channels.