A Measurement Study of Inter-Vehicular Communication Using Steerable Beam Directional Antenna

This paper provides a measurement study of a single Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) link using 802.11b as the link layer technology. The goal is to investigate practical usage of steerable beam directional antennas to improve V2V communications. The authors conduct extensive experiments using commercially available phased-array antennas mounted on cars in two different environments - suburban roads and highways, with various drive patterns. It is observed that directional beamforming improves the link SNR significantly, that translates to significant range improvements.