Design and Verification of a Virtual Drive Test Methodology for Vehicular LTE-A Applications
Design and Verification of a Virtual Drive Test Methodology for Vehicular LTE-A Applications
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DOI：
10.1109/tvt.2018.2794263
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发表时间：
2018-01
影响因子：
6.8
通讯作者：
Jue Cao;Di Kong;Michael Charitos;Denys Berkovskyy;A. Goulianos;Tom Mizutani;F. Tila;G. Hilton;A. Doufexi;A. Nix
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Jue Cao;Di Kong;Michael Charitos;Denys Berkovskyy;A. Goulianos;Tom Mizutani;F. Tila;G. Hilton;A. Doufexi;A. Nix
提出了一种用于车辆与基础设施长期演进高级(LTE-A)通信的虚拟驾驶测试(VDT)仿真方法，并对其进行了评估，并与传统的驾驶测试方法进行了比较。基于三维射线跟踪信道模型、理论和实测天线方向图、射频(RF)信道仿真和半实物(HIL)无线电测量，开发了一种通用的天线和无线电测试流程。针对特定场地的虚拟环境，对启用多输入多输出(MIMO)的LTE-A基站(BS)和被测车辆之间的无线电传播信道的空间和时间多径分量进行了精确建模。测量的BS和LTE-A车载天线方向图通过空间卷积和极化卷积与合成射线数据合并到系统中。产生的频道被流入宽带频道仿真器，该仿真器将多通道LTE-A BS仿真器连接到代表车载单元(OBU)的智能手机。实验室LTE-A半实物仿真系统用于研究两个服务LTE-A基站之间根据车载OBU接收到的射频功率进行切换的过程。将仿真的射频功率和数据吞吐量与传统路测的数据进行比较，以验证所提出方法的合法性。我们的VDT在参考信号接收功率和物理下行链路共享信道吞吐量方面的结果与单输入、单输出和MIMO操作的真实世界LTE-A测量结果很好地匹配。这一新过程的好处在于可重复使用光线跟踪刻度，以支持广泛的城市和农村运营环境。
In this paper, a virtual drive test (VDT) emulation methodology for vehicle-to-infrastructure long-term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) communications is proposed, evaluated, and compared against a traditional drive test approach. A generic antenna and radio test process is developed based on 3-D ray-traced channel models, theoretic and measured antenna patterns, radio frequency (RF) channel emulation, and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) radio measurements. The spatial and temporal multipath components of the radio propagation channel between the multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO)-enabled LTE-A base stations (BS) and the vehicle under test are accurately modeled for a site-specific virtual environment. Measured BS and LTE-A vehicular antenna patterns are incorporated into the system via spatial and polarimetric convolution with the synthetic ray data. The resulting channels are streamed into a wideband channel emulator that connects a multichannel LTE-A BS emulator to a smartphone representing the vehicular on-board-unit (OBU). The laboratory-based LTE-A HIL system is used to study the handover process between two serving LTE-A BSs according to the received RF powers at the vehicular OBU. Emulated RF powers and data throughputs are compared with data from a traditional drive test to verify the legitimacy of the proposed methodology. Our VDT results in terms of reference signal received power and physical downlink shared channel throughput match well the real-world LTE-A measurements for single-input and single-output and MIMO operation. This new process benefits from being repeatable and via the use of ray-tracing scales to support a wide range of urban and rural operating environments.