Weighted Partial Radiation Efficiency and Effective Coverage as Key Performance Indicators for the Analysis of Automotive Antennas

It is essential to characterize the automotive antennain its installed state because the metallic car body has asignificant influence on the antenna's performance. In this connection,the 5GAA has recommended certain key performanceindicators (KPIs), such as the Total Radiated Power (TRP), PartialRadiated Power (PRP), etc. for evaluating automotive antennas.However, these KPIs do not adequately reflect the vehicularintegration effects on the antenna’s performance. In orderto fill this gap, two novel KPIs have been proposed in this paper,namely, the weighted Partial Radiation Efficiency and EffectiveCoverage. The weighting scheme for the calculation of the KPIshas been defined based on direction of importance. To demonstratetheir significance, two different vehicular antenna integrationtopologies have been evaluated employing the KPIs.The results have been compared with existing metrics namelyPRP and TRP.