Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11p infrastructure-to-vehicle real-world measurements with receive diversity

In this contribution, we present performance evaluation results for a multi-antenna receiver for Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) according to IEEE 802.11p. The analysis was performed by employing the Selection Combining (SC), the Equal Gain Combining (EGC) and the Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) algorithms on recently carried out real-world measurement data. We show that a well-engineered diversity combining algorithm, applied to multi-antenna systems, significantly improves the reliability and robustness, even under poor receive conditions. The resulting performance enhancement compared to the single antenna regime in case of the frame success ratio (FSR) is increased up to 25%. This is due to the fact that all available information from both antenna branches is utilized. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of different driving directions on the system performance.