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fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LCOMM.2020.3016634, IEEE
Communications Letters
Dedicated short-range communications: performance
evaluation over mmWave and potential adjustments
Yekaterina Sadovaya, Sergey Zavjalov
Abstract—Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication has proven
to enhance road safety and transportation systems. Currently,
there are two approaches to enable transmission between mov-
ing vehicles. The first one is the 3rd Generation Partnership
Project (3GPP) cellular vehicle-to-everything (V2X) specifica-
tions. Another approach is based on the IEEE 802.11 family
of standards. The latter group is commonly known as dedicated
short-range communications (DSRC). While the 3GPP V2X may
provide higher throughput by the adoption of the millimeter-wave
(mmWave) spectrum, its reliability depends on the availability of
the infrastructure. On the other hand, DSRC is more intensively
deployed. However, the supported throughput is significantly
lower compared to the new radio (NR)-based technology. This
drawback can be overcome by exploiting the mmWave bands by
DSRC. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the 802.11p
technology at 28 GHz. Besides, several equalizing techniques
are applied in order to improve the multipath immunity of the
considered setup.
Index Terms—V2X, DSRC, mmWave
I. I NTRODUCTION
The most promising solution for reducing the number of
road accidents is to enable communication between vehi-
cles. Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology combines sev-
eral functionalities, i.e. vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-
infrastructure (V2I), vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P), and vehicle-
to-network (V2N). However, all the mentioned applications
rely on service availability in a considered region. Dedicated
short-range communications (DSRC) are originally IEEE
802.11a-based.
The most-deployed representative of DSRC is the 802.11p
technology where the transmission is enabled thought the
formation of a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET). This
approach allows vehicles to communicate with each other
without a nearby presence of the base station (BS). The com-
parison of wireless local area network (WLAN)-based V2V
and Long-Term Evolution (LTE)-based V2X [1] demonstrates
that LTE-V2X has an advantage in terms of data rates. On
the other hand, WLAN-based solutions outperform in terms
of transmission latency. Moreover, DSRC is already exploited
by the intelligent transportation system (ITS)-G5 in Europe
and the US, which makes further improvements simpler [2].
Currently, an extension of the 802.11p technology – IEEE
P802.11bd is under development. The physical layer in both
cases is driven by orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing
This research work was supported by Peter the Great St. Petersburg
Polytechnic University in the framework of the Program ”5-100-2020”.
Y. Sadovaya and S. Zavjalov are with Peter the Great
St.Petersburg Polytechnic University, (e-mail: sadovaya.es@edu.spbstu.ru,
zavyalov sv@spbstu.ru), 195251 St Petersburg, Russia.
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(OFDM). Compared to their predecessors, operating band-
width and subcarrier spacing in vehicular standards are de-
creased by the factor of two. This allows to double the useful
symbol duration. At the same time, the length of the cyclic
prefix (CP) is longer to handle the root-mean-square (RMS)
delay spread (DS) in the fast-changing environment. The data
rated provided by the 802.11p technology vary from 6 Mbps
to 27 Mbps.
IEEE P802.11bd aims to provide higher data rates by
enabling higher-order modulation schemes of up to 256QAM
and 20 MHz of bandwidth. The mentioned improvements
allow to enhance the throughput of only twice compared to
the 802.11p technology. This is due to the limited spectrum
resources available at 5.9 GHz. Therefore, support of 60
GHz is considered by the standardization body. Nonetheless,
utilization of the mmWave spectrum poses a challenge in the
V2V environment due to the higher path loss (PL) and the
Doppler spread [3].
Also, there is insufficient literature dedicated to mmWave
V2V channel characterization. In [4], measurements were
conducted at 28 GHz to investigate the blockage effect caused
by a vehicle. Omnidirectional ray-based channel modeling was
performed in [5] to report the PL and the DS. The publication
was extended in [6] to account for antenna directionality.
However, all the listed works measure only the physical
parameters of the channel. The performance of the vehicular
standards over 5.9 GHz was attempted in [7] to estimate the
impact of the adjacent WiFi transmission. Nevertheless, DSRC
system-level evaluation over mmWave has not been addressed
so far.
Potentially, one of the main challenges in mmWave DSRC
will be channel estimation. Original estimation in the 802.11p
technology is based on the preamble, which cannot guarantee a
suitable equalization in the dynamic V2V environment. There
are several works related to the enhancement of the equaliza-
tion procedure for DSRC. In [8], it was proposed to employ the
midamble-based channel estimation. The time-domain least
square estimation (TDLSE) scheme was introduced in [9].
The discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-based equalization is
discussed in [10]. The authors of [11] propose to adopt the
Weiner filtration to minimize an estimation error.
As a summary of this literature review, the gap is iden-
tified as follows. V2V communications enabled by the NR
technology provide higher throughput. However, it relies on
service availability while DSRC is already widely deployed.
Nonetheless, it provides significantly smaller data rates com-
pared to V2X. Nevertheless, it is possible to demonstrate that
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Communications Letters

802.11-based standards may also operate over mmWave bands.
Therefore, we addressed the performance of the 802.11p
technology at 28 GHz. For realistic channel recreation, the
ray-tracing results from [6] are employed. The use of ray-
tracing simulations allows accounting for such physical effects
as reflection, diffraction, and transmission through obstacles.
In order to increase the immunity to multipath in a fast-varying
V2V environment, five different equalizing techniques were
considered.
The rest of the text is organized in the following way. Sec-
tion II describes the channel model and DSRC configurations
utilized in our simulations. Section III outlines the adopted
equalization techniques. Our simulation results are reported in
Section IV. Conclusions are made in Section V.
II. M ETHODOLOGY
A. DSRC parameters
As it was stated in the previous section, the 802.11p technol-
ogy was designed based on the 802.11a standard. Traditionally,
Wi-Fi standards are developed for low-mobility applications.
However, by the extended CP, it enables transmission in
a vehicular environment. Similarly to all the latter WLAN
standards, the OFDM-based physical layer is exploited. Hence,
a typical OFDM transmission scheme depicted in Fig. 1 was
utilized in our simulations with the DSRC-specific parameters
and the channel model. As can be seen from Table I, the
channel bandwidth in the 802.11p technology is 10 MHz.
However, in IEEE P802.11bd it was extended to 20 MHz.
According to the specifications [12], the maximum equiva-
lent isotropically radiated power (EIRP) for a V2V transceiver
is 44.8 dBm. The PL in our simulations is obtained via a
ray launching simulator as in [6]. After the PL is calculated,
the VANET is created. The VANET formation is performed
according to the best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) criterion;
thus, each car is connected through those links, which have
the highest SNR. The number of modeled links corresponds
to the total number of transceivers.
TX: bin 0
Encoded & bin 1
Map
modulated Add
data & L-size x(n)
CP
S2P IDFT D/A
& Channel
&
P2S
Add
0’s
bin L-1
TABLE I. Standard parameters of the 802.11p technology
Parameter Value
FFT size 64
FFT period 6.4
GI duration 1.6
Symbol duration 8
No. of data subcarriers 48
No. of pilot subcarriers 4
Code rate 1/2; 2/3; 3/4
Bit rate 3; 4.5; 6; 9; 12; 18; 24; 27
Subcarrier spacing 156.25 kHz
Bandwidth 10 MHz; 20 MHz
B. Vehicular Scenario and Channel Model
Our modeling scenario corresponds to a deterministic
highway environment with line-of-sight (LoS) and non-LoS
(NLoS) links. The size of the highway is 700x15 meters where
the choice of the size is explained in [13]. The vehicular
density of 0.004 m−2 corresponds to 42 cars in total on
the chosen area. The minimum distance between the vehicles
is 1 meter. The antennas are located in the front, rear, and
sides of the vehicles. For such deployment, we apply the ray-
based modeler to obtain the channel impulse responses (CIRs)
between the vehicles. An example of a CIR is demonstrated
in Fig. 2 together with the OFDM signal in time with the
amplitudes and time shifts corresponding to each multipath
component (MPC) before the overlay. During the computation
procedure, the transmitters (TXs) are assigned in a for loop of
168 where 168 corresponds to the total number of antennas.
During the one iteration, the rest of the antennas act as
the receivers (RXs). The main characteristics required to
reproduce the multipath channel are the powers and delays
of the MPCs.
On the next stage of calculations, the vehicles are linked
with each other to create a VANET. It is noteworthy that each
vehicle can be connected to another with only one link. The
connection between the system and link-level modeling is as
follows. Once the links are established, simulations launch for
all the connections between two antennas. The selection of a
pair is performed randomly and repeated until the statistics
are gathered. The multipath channel is modeled with CIRs
ejωt
x(t)
Multipath
Re [·]

RX:
bin 0
e-jωt bin 1
Discard inactive

Output
Rem. Map
y(t) y(n) L-size data
CP &
LPF A/D & DFT P2S
S2P

bin L-1

Fig. 2. Example of the CIR over a single realization at the left

Fig. 1. OFDM TX and RX block diagrams of the 802.11p side and the delayed copies of the OFDM signal in the time
technology. domain at the right side.

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obtained on the previous step for all the pairs of antennas. The
simulations in each link are performed according to the block
diagram in Fig. 1 with DSRC-specific parameters. Before data
arrives at the first block of the diagram in Fig. 1, it is en-
coded by a convolutional encoder, interleaved and modulated.
Doppler shift is modeled as the additional carrier frequency
offset (CFO) ∆f = ±v/λ where λ is the wavelength; v is the
total velocity of vehicles between which the connection was
established. The sign of the shift is chosen randomly. During
the calculation, we change the parameters in order to satisfy
the channel requirements.
III. E QUALIZATION M ETHODS
A. Least Squares (LS) Estimator
As a benchmark of our simulations, we utilize the LS esti-
mator, which is currently adopted by the 802.11p technology.
This is a basic equalizer, which employs pilots to correct the
CFO and estimate the channel response. The LS estimator is
equal to what is also referred to as the zero-forcing estimator.
For the LS, the time domain symbols are extracted first. Then,
the N -points DFT is calculated.
In the common form, the LS channel estimation determines
the channel estimate HLS in such a way that it minimizes the
cost function as
C(HLS ) = ||Y − XHLS ||2 ,
where X is the DFT matrix of the pilot symbols x(k) at
the k-th subcarrier; Y is the frequency domain received pilot
symbols. By striving the derivative of (1) to zero, the solution
of the LS channel estimate is obtained as
HLS = (X H X)−1 X H Y = X −1 Y,
where (.)H is the Hermidian transpose.
B. Minimum-mean-square (MMS) Estimator
The MMS estimator demonstrates more accurate channel
estimation compared to the LS by utilization of an additional
weight matrix to minimize the MMS error. The common form
of the MMS estimation of the channel vector g is given by
HM M S = W HLS .
The weight matrix is expressed as
W = RHY RY−1Y ,
where
RHY = E[HY H ] = RHH X H
is the cross-covariance matrix between the channel vector
H and the received symbols Y ; RY Y is the auto-covariance
matrix, which is determined as
RY Y = E[Y Y H ] = XRHH X H + σn2 IN .
where IN refers to the N -th order identity matrix. The
MMS scheme provides higher estimation accuracy compared
to the LS. However, it is not commonly employed due to its
computational complexity.
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Communications Letters
C. DFT-based Estimator
In this scheme, the channel response provided by the MMS
estimator is converted back to the time domain. This is realized
by taking the inverse DFT (IDFT) of the HM M S (k). Then
corresponding coefficients of the time-domain response are
selected and converted back to the frequency domain. Hence,
the obtained HDF T (k) holds
HDF T (k) = DFT[IDFT(HLS (k))]. (7)
It is worth noticing that the DFT-based estimator can be
applied for both LS and MMS estimators. Hence, equation
(7) can also be written with the HM M S .
D. Estimator based on the pseudo-random noise (PRN) se-
quences
This scheme is also known as the TDLSE estimator. It was
proposed in [9]. The main idea behind this scheme is the
insertion of the PRN sequence into the prefix of the OFDM
system. On the other hand, the initial response is derived by
the LS, which enables the lower complexity of this algorithm.
In our simulations, the MMS estimator is adopted for the
derivation of the estimate. The estimation is performed for
the received symbols and the replaced PN sequence. Then,
an obtained channel estimation is averaged with the adjacent
symbols. Originally, Zadoff–Chu sequence was inserted. How-
(1)
ever, any PRN sequences can be employed for this purpose. In
our simulations, m-sequence is utilized. Further, two options
are considered. First is the original TDLSE approach with m-
sequence. The next one is the combination of the TDLSE with
the DFT-based estimator.
(2) IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
The bit error rate (BER) performance for the described
equalization techniques over 28 GHz channel is depicted
in Fig. 3. For comparison purposes, lower and higher-order
modulation schemes are presented. Precisely, 16QAM and
256QAM, which was enabled by the recent extension of the
standard. In both simulations, the coding rate was set to R =
1/2. Two CP lengths of 1.6 µs (1/4 FFT size) and 3.2 µs (1/2
FFT size) were tested with the subcarrier spacing of 156.25
(3) kHz. The channel DS at 5.9 GHz reported in [14] is 18.7 ns
for the LoS and 58.8 ns for the NLoS highway. The values of
the RMS DS at 28 GHz are 51 ns for the high density and
(4) 92.67 ns for the low density of vehicles for the NLoS highway
[5]. To avoid intersymbol interference (ISI), the size of the CP
(5) must be significantly higher than the DS of the channel. From
the reported numbers it can be noted that this condition is
satisfied at 28 GHz. Hence, the corresponding CP lengths of
1.6 µs and 3.2 µs are enough to avoid ISI.
As can be observed in Fig. 3, the worst performance over
the considered equalization techniques corresponds to the LS
(6)
equalizer. The switch to the MMS criterion allows to achieve
smaller BER at 1.5-2 dB lower SNR levels compared to the
LS. A similar gain is achieved when the PRN is inserted
additionally. Another important effect was noted for 256QAM.
It can be seen from the left plot of Fig. 3 that applying the
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Communications Letters
Fig. 3. SNR vs BER curves over 28 GHz channel with M = 16, CP duration = 1.6 µs at the left side and with M = 256, CP
duration = 3.2 µs at the right side
DFT smoothing matrix does not provide significant improve-
ments to SNR vs BER performance. However, the situation
drastically changes for 256QAM. As it is demonstrated in the
right plot of Fig. 3, the combination of PRN-based estimation
with the DFT provides the most promising results. Also, the
exploiting of the DFT matrix enables from 4 to 6.7 dB gain in
SNR. However, adding the Doppler effect drastically reduces
the performance of all the considered schemes. Especially, if
the total velocity of vehicles is higher than 30 km/h. In this
case, CFO tracking algorithms should be applied in addition
to equalization techniques. Further enhancements are also
possible by changes in the parameters. For example, more
pilot subcarriers can be exploited for channel estimation or
an increased number of antenna array elements.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, the DSRC system was evaluated over the
28 GHz channel. Our modeling confirms the applicability
of the considered frequency band. The combination of DFT
and PRN-based channel estimations was demonstrated to be
the most efficient, especially for higher modulation orders.
Nevertheless, the output with the Doppler shift establishes the
need for additional CFO tracking. These results might be a
reference point for future mmWave DSRC design.
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