SMART ANTENNA [BEAM-STEERING] FOR IEEE802.

11p - A survey This report discusses the use of smart antenna (beam steering) in IEEE802.11p
focusing more on road safety applications. We would discuss general issues, advantages in car-2-car as well as car-2-infastructure and highlight some challenges in using smart antenna.

General Importance to vehicular network

Smart antennas apart from that they steer beams to desired targets; they are also able to transmit in all directions, these gives smart antennas a big hand. For example when a car enters a vehicular environment and wishes to search or broadcast its presence, it can do it Omni directionally as well. One thing about the vehicular environments is that the devices need to be directly connected to each are few. Only the infrastructure, the car in front or at the back needs to be addressed or to connected directly since the roads are well organized. About less than 5 target devices a smart antenna needs address almost simultaneously. Multiple beams could be steered simultaneously in the specified direction. This greatly reduces interferences as devices only communicate to concerned vehicle or infrastructure rather than Omni directionally causing interference and packet collision everywhere. [1] used beam forming with geographic routing for broadcasting car-2-X ,simulation shows higher probability of success and bandwidth utilization. This improves the performance of broadcasting crash incident or warnings. Cars receive a lot of signal constantly and they may still have some interferences but with the use of adaptive array antenna all interferences could be carefully turned into gain [4]. SMART ANTENNAS IN CAR-TO-INFASTRUCTURE APPLICATIONS Concerning the usage of smart antenna (beam steering), it would be best that infrastructure nodes be simply omnidirectional because of the fact that they may be associated with multiple vehicular nodes in different directions. If beam steering is used coordination will be an issue beams will need to be steered to the right client at the right time[2], however rather than omnidirectional antenna I would suggest beam

switched antenna where multiple beams are formed in all directions for the infrastructure nodes. In applications such as emergency calls, traffic control messages, where longer range and good connectivity is needed. [2] shows that when beam forming is used a gain of 7dB could be achieved and could get up to 11db gain if stored geographical information on the area is used alongside beam forming. Other applications such as infrastructure speed tracking and pay tolling system need to receive messages from the vehicles reliably and long lived connection would be necessary in cases where the car is at long distance. These could be achieved through beam steering. SMART ANTENNAS IN CAR-TO-CAR APPLICATIONS In application such as collision avoidance, emergency park light and many others involves sending cooperative awareness messages CAMs which are periodic and needs to be sent with low latency and reliability. From [3] smart antenna promises drastical improvements in high through put and reliability. Especially in application where information might pass through many nodes the ad-hoc network there are a lot of end to end delays. [3] shows that beam steering could improve performance by reducing end-to-end delay up to a factor of 28.

CHALLENGES OF BEAM-FORMING COST: Smart antennas consist of digital signal processors DSPs and array antenna which are quite expensive relative to the omnidirectional antennas. It would be costly to implement in existing cars considering also the IEEE802.11p low penetration rate. However in newly manufactured cars the cost will not be an issue relative to the price of the car. I would suggest cheap directional antennas can be steered rather than using expensive DSPs to form large beams to be steered. MAC LAYER CHANGES FOR EFFECTIVE USAGE : for the full potential of beam steering to utilized a lot changes need to be done in the mac layer protocol of the IEEE802.1p combat issues such as directional exposed terminal, loss in channel state, directional hidden terminal problem and deafness [4].

REFERENCES [1] A. Soua, W. Ben-Ameur and H.afifi. Enhancing broadcast Vehicular communication using beam forming technique. International workshop on vehicular communications and networking(VECON) 2012. [2] V.Navada, A. Subramanian, K. Dhanasekarakm, A. timm-Giel and Samir R. Das, (2007) MobiSteer: using steerable beam directional antenna for vehicular network access [3]R. Raman than, "On the performance of ad hoc networks using beam forming antennas", Proc. ACM MOBIHOC 2001, Long Beach, California, USA, October 2001. [4] R. Ramanathan, "Antenna Beamforming and Power Control for Ad Hoc Networks," in Mobile Ad Hoc Networking, S. Basagni et al. (eds), IEEE Press/Wiley, 2004.