Two-tier cellular communication systems with enhanced vehicular-based primary nodes

摘要

Two-tier cellular communication systems introduce a primary-secondary connectivity structure that improves the performance of cellular systems by offsetting the limitations of mobile User Equipment (UE) and providing superior high performing links to system Access Points (APs). This paper considers two-tier cellular systems employing vehicular-based primary nodes, with focus on enhancing the performance of primary links connecting vehicular nodes with system APs. Current vehicle mounted antenna designs do not take advantage of the relaxed energy and spacing constraints confining mobile UE antennas, thus limiting vehicle antenna gains to the elimination of vehicle penetration losses only. The employment of widely-spaced vehicular antenna arrays is proposed in this paper to enable the exploitation of high-order Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) transmission schemes. Detailed system-level simulations are employed to compare the performance of various vehicular antenna array configurations for a wide range of deployment scenarios. When compared to narrowly-spaced antenna arrays with low-order MIMO transmission schemes, widely-spaced vehicular antenna arrays utilizing high-order MIMO transmission schemes are shown to provide substantial system coverage and capacity gains.