Abstract
Broadband communication is playing an increasingly important role in the
automotive industry's roadmap for vehicle data connectivity. In particular, high-bandwidth data
services are being considered to enable and support a variety of applications to enhance driver
and vehicle performance and safety, add convenience, and support vehicle manufacturer needs
for information and customer relationship management.
The industry faces two technology challenges in realizing this vision. First, moving vehicles
operate in a rapidly varying and highly complex radio environment that increases the difficulty of
reliably delivering high quality broadband services. The drop-outs, lost calls, and quality
variations experienced by cellular users in vehicles today are unacceptable in a communications
environment that includes crash avoidance and emergency response among its top priorities.
These link quality issues become even more pronounced for high-bandwidth services because of
the higher signal strength required for acceptable connectivity. Second, the vehicle presents
additional material selection, aerodynamic, and manufacturing cost constraints. Vehicle design
dictates compact form factors as well as simple integration with other vehicle electronics without
extensive customization of the highly-integrated devices now offered in the industry.
Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces Multi-Antenna Signal-processing (MAS)
approaches that yield significant gains even from compact configurations. These approaches
leverage antenna processing algorithms that can be easily designed into client devices between
their radio front-end and baseband processing elements. MAS technologies can enable double
range and almost double cell-edge data rates compared to single-antenna solutions, depending on
the number and placement of antennas incorporated into the vehicle. These techniques have been
field-proven in mobile environments and are ready for integration into vehicle data
communications devices. This paper describes the basic diversity and interference mitigation
approaches used in the solutions and their results.
Keywords - Broadband, Wireless, Array, Multi-Antenna, Signal-processing