Modelling on Impact of Building Obstruction for V2I Communication Link in Micro Cellular Environment

In vehicular communication, signal transmission in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) mode typically takes place on highways, urban, suburban and rural environments. The presence of buildings in these environments poses a challenge to model path loss (PL) due to multiple propagation mechanisms such as diffractions and reflections. However, very little attention has been made to address building effects on the performance of V2I communication links in microcell environment. This paper investigates signal propagation characteristics caused by the impact of building under micro-cellular environment whereby the base station or road-side-unit (RSU) is usually located under the rooftop of building to allow communication between RSU and mobile station or on-board-unit (OBU) on the road. The goal of this paper is to validate and discuss available path loss models based on effect of building obstruction towards RSU-OBU links specifically in residential housing area. The channel measurements are conducted based on static line-of-sight (LOS) settings of a real-world environment at 2.4 GHz frequency band using IEEE 802.15.4 XBee S2C compliant device to measure its receive power. The results are demonstrated based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and root mean square error (RMSE). The attenuation profile is validated and compared with suitable path loss models to evaluate best fit and most compatible model based on our measurements data and environment. The analysis shows that several V2I path loss models and V2V channel models are applicable to be used as a reference to model in LOS microcell environment with building obstruction. The finding shows that PL Urban yields the best fit V2I path loss model in terms of RMSE when compared to our measurement campaign at 2.4 GHz. (paper)