5G V2V Communication With Antenna Selection Based on Context Awareness: Signaling and Performance Study

Enhanced vehicle-to-everything (eV2X) communication is one of the key challenges to be addressed by the fifth generation (5G) of cellular mobile communications. In particular, eV2X includes some 5G vehicular applications targeting fully autonomous driving which require ultra-high reliability. Although vehicular communications are by default assumed between single antennas located on the roof of the transmitter and receiver vehicles, prior art has shown that there are other antenna positions more suitable for V2X communication, depending on the specific communication context. Antenna selection can be used in this case to select one specific antenna or a subset of them better suited for a certain communication link. In this work, we propose a context-aware antenna selection procedure able to enhance the communication with multi-antenna vehicles. To enable such scheme in 5G systems, we discuss the necessary signaling to extend current 5G radio resource control and radio resource management mechanisms, which are mainly focused on single-antenna communication. The signaling overhead caused by context exchange for antenna selection is analyzed and compared to the overhead when reference signals are exchanged for that purpose instead. Finally, simulation results for a 5G platooning use case are presented to show the advantages of antenna selection.