A new reconfigurable antenna scheme and its application to vehicle-to-vehicle communications

Reconfigurable antenna arrays provide important advantages such as reduction on the number of the physical antennas or reduced hardware complexity in terms of receiving radio frequency chains. Both these properties are critical in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems, which are characterized by inflexible dimensions and cost constraints. In this paper, a new pattern reconfigurable antenna array selection scheme is proposed that aims to reduce the complexity of the traditional antenna selection techniques. For this scheme, an analytical statistical framework is developed for characterizing the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The analysis is general enough to take into consideration the impact of correlation on the antenna patterns. Special cases are also studied assuming independence between the patterns, while the diversity and coding gains are also evaluated. The performance is analysed using the criteria of outage probability and the average bit error probability. Moreover, the new scheme is applied in a V2V communication scenario based on the IEEE 802.11p standard, while it is compared with other well-known receivers under different channel model conditions.