Measurement and Simulation for Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communications at 3.5 GHz for 5G

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is more and more crucial in the modern transportation field, such as the applications of autonomous vehicles, dynamic traffic light sequences, and automatic road enforcement. As the upcoming fifth-generation mobile network (5G) is entering the deployment phase, the idea of cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) is proposed. The same 5G networks, coming to mobile phones, will also allow vehicles to communicate wirelessly with each other. Hence, 3.5 GHz, as the main sub-6 GHz band licensed in 5G, is focused in our study. In this paper, a comprehensive study on the channel characteristics for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) link at 3.5 GHz frequency band is conducted through channel measurements and ray-tracing (RT) simulations. Firstly, the channel parameters of the V2I link are characterized based on the measurements, including power delay profile (PDP), path loss, root-mean-square (RMS) delay spread, and coherence bandwidth. Then, the measurement-validated RT simulator is utilized to conduct the simulations in order to supplement other channel parameters, in terms of the Ricean K-factor, angular spreads, the cross-correlations of abovementioned parameters, and the autocorrelation of each parameter itself. This work is aimed at helping the researchers understand the channel characteristics of the V2I link at 3.5 GHz and support the link-level and system level design for future vehicular communications of 5G.