Propagation of multipath components at an urban intersection

Urban intersections constitute an important safety-critical scenario for vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Based on measurements, this paper presents detailed investigations of the radio wave propagation processes in a typical urban intersection. We focus on one time instance of the propagation process and set up hypothesis for locations of the scattering objects. Multipath components (MPCs) are identified and an MPC tracking algorithm is applied. The number of MPCs and the lifetime of MPCs for this communication scenario are analyzed. It is concluded that the lifetime of an MPC is heavily dependent on its relative power, with typical values in the range 0.05-0.3 s corresponding to 0.5-3 m travel distance of the vehicles.