A semi-virtual measurement environment for testing multi-antenna systems intended for vehicle-to-vehicle communication at 5.9GHz is presented that allows the emulation of the radio channel and thus enables the user to test different hardware and software configurations for a multi-antenna system in realistic and reproducible traffic scenarios already in the laboratory. The radio channel is determined by a ray-tracing simulation of the multi-path propagation of the electromagnetic waves in a virtual 3D scenario. By using the measured or simulated complex radiation characteristics of the individual antenna elements of a multi-antenna system in the simulation of the radio link between a transmitter and a receiver, different multi-antenna systems can be taken into account in the ray-tracing simulation. Moreover, a traffic simulator is used to include varying traffic conditions in the virtual traffic environment. By emulating the simulated radio channel characteristics for each antenna element, a realistic multi-antenna radio frequency signal can be generated. This signal can be used as input signal for testing different multi-antenna systems. Results of the ray-tracing simulation in different 3D scenarios are presented. Besides the measurement environment itself, two hardware circuits are presented. They form together with a micro-controller running the control algorithms a two antenna diversity system. The real-world test drive and the corresponding ray-tracing simulation are carried out on the premises of the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich. The collected measurement data is compared with the measured metrics obtained by channel emulation. The results show good agreement along the test route driven. After verification of the used emulation approach the presented hardware configurations and two antenna combination techniques are tested in different ray-tracing scenarios. The obtained results are compared in terms of the measured signal level and quality.     «

A semi-virtual measurement environment for testing multi-antenna systems intended for vehicle-to-vehicle communication at 5.9GHz is presented that allows the emulation of the radio channel and thus enables the user to test different hardware and software configurations for a multi-antenna system in realistic and reproducible traffic scenarios already in the laboratory. The radio channel is determined by a ray-tracing simulation of the multi-path propagation of the electromagnetic waves in a virt...     »