High Throughput Vehicular Communication Using Spatial Multiplexing MIMO

Vehicular communication is emerging more and more to make a safer and more comfortable transportation system. To improve road safety and convenient transport facilities, lots of information like traffic congestion, navigation data, traffic status on the road, accident updates need to be shared among vehicles to alert drivers. Only by doing so fully autonomous vehicles can operate in a more feasible way. Sharing information accurately is not an easy task due to the presence of fading in the channel and mobility of the vehicles. Thus a more robust communication system is necessary to make the existing transportation system more efficient. Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) is an existing approach for vehicular communication under the IEEE 802.11p standard yet not feasible to transfer real-time data with the high data rate. In this paper, we propose a modified PHY layer of the existing IEEE 802.11p standard to employ spatial multiplexing MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) for higher throughput while keeping the bit error rate lower than currently what we have now. Spatial multiplexing MIMO can provide high throughput while supporting real-time data transfer in a non-line-of-sight environment. So, this work employed spatial multiplexing MIMO on top of DSRC to achieve improved throughput. The results show that the proposed PHY layer model achieves more than twice throughput compared to the existing model.