Achieving Latency-Aware V2V Communication with Distributed Antenna Systems

The future of accident-free road mobility hinges on reliable Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, especially as autonomous vehicles become more prevalent. The potential of the Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) to improve throughput, data rates, and overall network efficiency has been well investigated and proved. However, its performance, especially in latency-aware dense vehicular networks, has not been studied. In this paper, we investigate the performance gain of DAS by equipping the vehicles with three antenna elements mounted on the roof and the bumpers. This results in a significant enhancement of communication reliability. Due to its low complexity and ease of implementation, the DAS relies on the use of selection combining technique allowing the exploitation of the most robust signal received by the antenna elements. Extensive system-level simulations for a highway scenario show that the DAS can significantly improve communication robustness and reliability, especially in scenarios with a large number of communicating vehicles. By effectively harnessing data from both antenna configurations, our study reveals an almost $60 \%$ improvement in terms of the achieved packet loss rate. Moreover, insights gained in this study could be used to support the trade-off analysis between additional antenna costs and V2V communication performance.