Performance Analysis of Multihop Inter-Vehicle Communications with Two-Relay Collaboration

A novel collaborative strategy employing two relays is developed for the multihop inter-vehicle communication (IVC) systems in this paper, which has great complexity degradation. Instead of the traditional terminal collaboration or relay tier space-time coding (STC), a relay tier interaction is proposed. Considering time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme, two spatial adjacent vehicles are conjoined by an interaction radio link to create a virtual antenna array (VAA). Then the collaborative two-relay is integrated into a multihop IVC network mentioned above, which enables a single-antenna terminal to share its antenna with other terminals easily, and avoids the synchronization or other complicated requirements in terminal collaboration or STC systems. Furthermore, except the low complexity in hardware implementation, the proposed method also can enhance the performance of the IVC systems over both the quasi-static jading channel and time varying Rayleigh jading relay channel, which is verified through the Monte-Carlo simulations.