Virtual Drive Testing of Adaptive Antenna Systems in Dynamic Propagation Scenarios for Vehicle Communications

Virtual drive testing (VDT) has gained great interest
from both industry and academia, owing to its promise to
replay field trials in a controllable laboratory condition. VDT is
especially appealing for vehicle communication scenarios, where
actual field trials can be difficult to carry out in practice.
Research work on VDT of adaptive antenna systems in dynamic
propagation scenarios has been limited, mainly due to high VDT
setup cost and lack of efficient dynamic propagation channel
models. In this paper, we propose to jointly emulate adaptive
antennas (i.e. beamformers) and radio channels in the radio
channel emulator to reduce the VDT setup cost. A simple
dynamic propagation channel framework, which is based on
linear interpolation of propagation parameters of the stationary
channel models, is also presented. We further experimentally
evaluate the beamformer capability (i.e. beam tracking and null
steering) in dynamic line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS)
scenarios in the proposed cost-effective conducted VDT setups.
The simulation and measurement results have demonstrated the
effectiveness of the beam tracking and nulling steering algorithms
in dynamic propagation conditions in the presence of interfering
signal. The proposed setup and dynamic channel modeling
framework are valuable for the VDT of adaptive antenna systems.