Abstract

Recently, the development of wireless communication technologies has led to parallel development in the concept of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to improve the safety and security of drivers and pedestrians. Thus, the ITS has been moved forward to include vehicle-to-everything (V2X), which comprises vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), vehicle-to cloud (V2C), vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to pedestrian (V2P), and vehicle-to-network (V2N). With this development direction, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) community defined the cellular network (5G/6G) as the bone platform connection for V2X technology. Thanks to the massive device connectivity, high data rate, and low service latency, along with the 5G’s capability (5G-V2X) will provide high-performance remote driving, map, video sharing vehicle platooning, and collision avoidance system. 

To enable 5G-V2X technology, smart and sophisticated antennas are needed. Usually, antennas are placed on the exterior parts of automobiles. Space is often limited for placing the antennas in automobiles. The antennas embedded inside the vehicle does not see an ideal radiation environment due to the scattering and shadowing caused by the automobiles. A significant portion of the automobiles is covered with glass. Thus, if antennas are optically transparent, then the antenna deployment space can be easily expanded to the windshields, mirrors, and sunroof. In this project, a transparent antenna system for vehicular technology is proposed. Moreover, a multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) configuration will be explored to further enhance the system performance, i.e., increasing data rates through multi-channel propagation.

Deliverables

• A link budget analysis will be carried out for mm-wave 5G bands in order to understand the required antenna performance such as gain, efficiency from wave propagation perspective, which will in turn form the base of the physical structure of the anticipated design.
• A literature survey of the state‐of‐the‐art antenna development technologies will be performed to analyze the different approaches and their efficacy. The outcomes of this survey will also be helpful to create a reference point to compare the performance of the proposed module.
• An electromagnetic simulation model will be created and antenna design optimization will be done through simulation study
• A proof‐of‐concept prototype of the optically transparent mm-Wave MIMO antenna will be realized through printing technique, and tested in the IMPACT lab at KAUST.