Synthesis Based Antenna Design for Car-to-Car Communication

As the design of a car is one of the most important selling criteria the antenna designer must be flexible to design antennas for cars without impeding its functionality and the aesthetics of the car. At this point the question arises, which antenna positions and what kind of radiation pattern/s would be the best in order to guarantee sufficient reception. In order to answer this question this paper uses an antenna synthesis methodology for the design of Car-to-Car (C2C) Communication antennas. The synthesis allows the optimization of antenna radiation patterns based on vehicle-specific limitations. The basic idea behind it is to design antenna systems with volume-related channel knowledge, that can be obtained for instance through simulations. In this work 16 possible antenna locations on a vehicle with location-specific design constraints are considered and compared. For the synthesis a three-dimensional ray-tracing tool simulates a set of safety-critical C2C scenarios.