Exploiting Shadowing Stationarity for Antenna Selection in V2V Communications

Antenna selection (AS) techniques are considered as ideal candidates for vehicle-to-vehicle communications, since they improve system's performance and simultaneously satisfy the hardware and signal processing constraints that exist in these systems. However, the achieved gain over single antenna links is affected by the fast varying wireless channel, since AS is frequently performed using outdated versions of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, we propose an AS technique that exploits the stationarity of large-scale fading. In this context, by employing shadowing information as an AS criterion, the negative consequences of the outdated channel state information (CSI) can be alleviated, since large-scale fading varies more slowly than small-scale fading. The performance of the proposed technique is analyzed using the criteria of outage probability and average output SNR. It is shown that the proposed scheme outperforms the corresponding one that is based on outdated CSI, especially in scenarios with mild fading/shadowing channel conditions. Moreover, the influence of correlated shadowing on the system's performance has been also analytically investigated. The main results have been also verified by empirical data based on measurement campaigns in non-stationary communication conditions.