Performance Improvement for Vehicular Communications Using Alamouti Scheme with High Mobility

The IEEE 802.11p standard is the basic protocol for wireless access in a vehicular environment (WAVE), providing high throughput for multimedia and high quality for vehicular transmissions. However, IEEE 802.11p fails to offer any multi-antenna approaches. In this paper, a multipleinput single-output (MISO) implementation with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), aiming to improve the performance of IEEE 802.11p, is proposed. The authors investigate the impact of time-varying channel on the performance of Alamouti space-time block codes (STBC) in OFDM systems. The Alamouti STBC approach shows good performance in slow time-varying environments, while its Alamouti space frequency block codes (SFBC) counterpart performs better over fast time-varying environments. An adaptive switching scheme is proposed to select appropriate spaceblock coding (STBC or SFBC) in vehicular channels with high mobility levels. It is shown that the proposed adaptive scheme provides better performance compared with traditional spaceblock codes.