Tracking of Wideband Multipath Components in a Vehicular Communication Scenario

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-complexity algorithm for tracking multipath components in vehicular radio channels, validated with measurements at 5.7 GHz, improving understanding of dynamic multipath behavior for better channel modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multipath component tracking algorithm that performs comparably to state-of-the-art methods but with reduced complexity, validated through real measurements.

Findings

Tracking performance is comparable to Gaussian mixture PHD filter.

Channel gain fluctuations are accurately tracked with only 2.5 dB power loss.

Statistical distributions of MPCs and birth/death rates are provided.

Abstract

A detailed understanding of the dynamic processes of vehicular radio channels is crucial for its realistic modeling. In this paper, we present multipath components (MPCs) tracking results from a channel sounder measurement with 1 GHz bandwidth at a carrier frequency of 5.7 GHz. We describe in detail the applied algorithms and perform a tracking performance evaluation based on artificial channels and on measurement data from a tunnel scenario. The tracking performance of the proposed algorithm is comparable to the tracking performance of the state-of-the-art Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density filter, yet with a significantly lower complexity. The fluctuation of the measured channel gain is followed very well by the proposed tracking algorithm, with a power loss of only 2.5 dB. We present statistical distributions for the number of MPCs and the birth/death rate. The applied algorithms and tracking results can be used to enhance the development of geometry-based channel models.