Near-Ground Propagation Measurements for Vehicular Deployments

In the nearest future, connected vehicles will be widely spread due to ongoing standardization activities of vehicle-to-everything communications. However, exchanging real-time traffic information is challenging in urban environments with dense traffic where the line-of-sight might be blocked. In this work, we present the measurement results of the automotive communication and radar sensing through the obstructing vehicle, when the transmitting and receiving antennas are located very close to the ground, and the radio waves propagate near-ground, i.e. between the bottom of the car and the road pavement. It is shown that communication between two vehicles is undoubtedly feasible at distances starting from 1.5 m and antenna heights of 0.3 m with 16 dB loss. Almost the same losses are observed in a radar sensing for distances larger than 2 m.