Modeling of Non-WSSUS Double-Rayleigh Fading Channels for Vehicular Communications

This paper deals with the modeling of nonstationary time-frequency (TF) dispersive multipath fading channels for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems. As a main contribution, the paper presents a novel geometry-based statistical channel model that facilitates the analysis of the nonstationarities of V2V fading channels arising at a small-scale level due to the time-varying nature of the propagation delays. This new geometrical channel model has been formulated following the principles of plane wave propagation (PWP) and assuming that the transmitted signal reaches the receiver antenna through double interactions with multiple interfering objects (IOs) randomly located in the propagation area. As a consequence of such interactions, the first-order statistics of the channel model’s envelope are shown to follow a worse-than-Rayleigh distribution; specifically, they follow a double-Rayleigh distribution. General expressions are derived for the envelope and phase distributions, four-dimensional (4D) TF correlation function (TF-CF), and TF-dependent delay and Doppler profiles of the proposed channel model. Such expressions are valid regardless of the underlying geometry of the propagation area. Furthermore, a closed-form solution of the 4D TF-CF is presented for the particular case of the geometrical two-ring scattering model. The obtained results provide new theoretical insights into the correlation and spectral properties of small-scale nonstationary V2V double-Rayleigh fading channels.