Scooter-to-X Communications: Antenna Placement, Human Body Shadowing, and Channel Modeling

TL;DR

This paper investigates scooter-to-X wireless communication, highlighting how human body shadowing affects signal quality, and introduces models to account for these effects to improve safety-related vehicle communication systems.

Contribution

It provides extensive measurements of scooter-to-vehicle channels, quantifies human body shadowing effects, and develops models to predict shadowing based on relative positions.

Findings

Human body shadowing causes 9-18 dB signal attenuation.

Shadowing significantly impacts communication link reliability.

Incorporating shadowing effects in simulations improves accuracy.

Abstract

In countries such as Taiwan, with a high percentage of scooters, scooter-related accidents are responsible for most injuries and deaths of all traffic accidents. One viable approach to reduce the number of accidents is to utilize short-range wireless communications between the scooter and other vehicles. This would help neighboring vehicles to detect the scooter and vice-versa, thus reducing the probability of a collision. In this paper, we perform extensive measurements to characterize communication links between a scooter and other vehicles. Our results suggest that, when the line-of-sight propagation path is blocked by the body of the scooter driver (and possibly also a passenger), shadowing of the human body results in significant signal attenuation, ranging from 9 to 18 dB on average, presenting challenging channel characteristics unique to scooters. In addition, we perform simulations, which show that it is imperative to incorporate the body shadowing effect to obtain realistic simulation results. We also develop a model to determine whether human body shadowing is in effect, given the relative positions of the transmitter and the receiver.