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Electronics
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Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Technologies for Vehicular Communications and Autonomous Driving
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Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Technologies for Vehicular Communications and Autonomous Driving

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Microwave and Wireless Communications".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2021) | Viewed by 11286

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Alessandro Cidronali

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Information Engineering (DINFO), University of Florence, 50139 Florence, Italy
Interests: design of broadband microwave integrated circuits; CAD modeling for microwave devices and circuits
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The medium-term vision for intelligent mobility systems foresees the establishment of a radio communication network between vehicles and the road infrastructure, for the propagation of useful information aimed at safety and at efficient traffic management. In this context, autonomous vehicles play a central role in a prospective scenario, and represent the evolution of private and public massive mobility. This enhances the paradigm of intelligent mobility, and requires vehicles capable of sensing their environment and operating without human involvement.

This scenario determines the work of regulatory bodies in Europe, USA, and Asia, by which they try to establish common radio access technologies and protocols aimed to harmonize and stimulate the growth of intelligent mobility systems. Nevertheless, this significant effort is still far from producing a unique and widely accepted technology, suitable for the many case studies. As a matter of fact, there presently exists a number of overlapping and competing prospective technologies, suitable for the roll out of the intelligent mobility paradigm. Furthermore, to address specific needs, authorities need coexistence with developed and consolidated established applications. The need for a comprehensive discussion on the research mainstreams motivates this Special Issue.

This Special Issue collects the most relevant research works in the area of vehicular technologies, including components, circuits, systems, and signal processing, with special emphasis on microwave and millimeter wave techniques and methods. Potential applications are not limited to cars, but address automated land, sea, and airborne vehicles; automotive radar and other sensing techniques; navigation and localization; mobile communications; driver assistance; and over-the-air testing.

The Special Issue topics include the followings:

  • Front-end architecture for road-side units and on-board units;
  • Microwave and millimeter systems, modules, and components;
  • Automotive radar systems, modulation, waveforms, and compressive sensing;
  • Interference and coexistence issues;
  • Design and testing of antennas;
  • Channel measurements and modeling;
  • Mobile communications technique and performance;
  • Sensing and imaging techniques and systems;
  • Wireless localization, navigation, and sensor networks;
  • System measurements, performance evaluation, test, and validation.

Prof. Ing. Alessandro Cidronali
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • C-V2X
  • autonomous vehicle
  • communications
  • microwave systems
  • millimeter-wave systems
  • radar
  • navigation
  • measurements
  • antenna
  • coexistence

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 10011 KiB  
Article
Analysis of Dual-Band Direction of Arrival Estimation in Multipath Scenarios
by Alessandro Cidronali, Edoardo Ciervo, Giovanni Collodi, Stefano Maddio, Marco Passafiume and Giuseppe Pelosi
Electronics 2021, 10(11), 1236; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10111236 - 22 May 2021
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1439
Abstract
The present paper analyzes the performance of localization systems, based on dual-band Direction of Arrival (DoA) approach, in multi-path affected scenarios. The implemented DoA estimation, which belongs to the so-called Space and Frequency Division Multiple Access (SFDMA) technique, takes advantage of the use [...] Read more.
The present paper analyzes the performance of localization systems, based on dual-band Direction of Arrival (DoA) approach, in multi-path affected scenarios. The implemented DoA estimation, which belongs to the so-called Space and Frequency Division Multiple Access (SFDMA) technique, takes advantage of the use of two uncorrelated communication carrier frequencies, as already demonstrated by the authors. Starting from these results, this paper provides, first, the methodology followed to describe the localization system in the proposed simulation environment, and, as a second step, describes how multi-path effects may be taken into account through a set of full-wave simulations. The latter follows an approach based on the two-ray model. The validation of the proposed approach is demonstrated by simulations over a wide range of virtual scenarios. The analysis of the results highlights the ability of the proposed approach to describe multi-path effects and confirms enhancements in DoA estimation as experimentally evaluated by the same authors. To further assess the performance of the aforementioned simulation environment, a comparison between simulated and measured results was carried out, confirming the capability to predict DoA performance. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Technologies for Vehicular Communications and Autonomous Driving)
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16 pages, 7162 KiB  
Article
Modeling Small UAV Micro-Doppler Signature Using Millimeter-Wave FMCW Radar
by Marco Passafiume, Neda Rojhani, Giovanni Collodi and Alessandro Cidronali
Electronics 2021, 10(6), 747; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10060747 - 22 Mar 2021
Cited by 19 | Viewed by 4873
Abstract
With the increase in small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications in several technology areas, detection and small UAVs classification have become of interest. To cope with small radar cross-sections (RCSs), slow-flying speeds, and low flying altitudes, the micro-Doppler signature provides some of the [...] Read more.
With the increase in small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications in several technology areas, detection and small UAVs classification have become of interest. To cope with small radar cross-sections (RCSs), slow-flying speeds, and low flying altitudes, the micro-Doppler signature provides some of the most distinctive information to identify and classify targets in many radar systems. In this paper, we introduce an effective model for the micro-Doppler effect that is suitable for frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar applications, and exploit it to investigate UAV signatures. The latter depends on the number of UAV motors, which are considered vibrational sources, and their rotation speed. To demonstrate the reliability of the proposed model, it is used to build simulated FMCW radar images, which are compared with experimental data acquired by a 77 GHz FMCW multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cost-effective automotive radar platform. The experimental results confirm the model’s ability to estimate the class of the UAV, namely its number of motors, in different operative scenarios. In addition, the experimental results show that the motors rotation speed does not imprint a significant signature on the classification of the UAV; thus, the estimation of the number of motors represents the only viable parameter for small UAV classification using the micro-Doppler effect. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Technologies for Vehicular Communications and Autonomous Driving)
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16 pages, 1823 KiB  
Article
Atomic Network-Based DOA Estimation Using Low-Bit ADC
by Shuran Sheng, Peng Chen, Yuxuan Yao, Lenan Wu and Zhimin Chen
Electronics 2021, 10(6), 738; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10060738 - 20 Mar 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2050
Abstract
In the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation problem, when a low-bit analog to digital converter (ADC) is used, the estimation performance severely deteriorates. In this paper, the DOA estimation problem is considered in a low-cost direction finding system with low-bit ADC. To eliminate [...] Read more.
In the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation problem, when a low-bit analog to digital converter (ADC) is used, the estimation performance severely deteriorates. In this paper, the DOA estimation problem is considered in a low-cost direction finding system with low-bit ADC. To eliminate quantization noise, we propose a novel network ADCnet, which is a composition of fully connected layers and exponential linear unit (ELU) layers, and the input signals are the received signals using low-bit ADC. After the ADCnet, an AtomicNet is also proposed to estimate the DOA from the denoised signals, where atomic vectors are corresponding to the steer vectors. A loss function considering both the reconstruction performance and the sparsity is proposed in the AtomicNet. Different from the exiting atomic norm-based methods, the proposed method can avoid an optimization problem and estimate the DOA with lower computational complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in the DOA estimation performance using low-bit ADC. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Technologies for Vehicular Communications and Autonomous Driving)
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13 pages, 5509 KiB  
Article
Design of a Compact and Highly Efficient Energy Harvester System Suitable for Battery-Less Low Cost On-Board Unit Applications
by Giovanni Collodi, Stefano Maddio and Giuseppe Pelosi
Electronics 2021, 10(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10010003 - 23 Dec 2020
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2089
Abstract
This study addresses the general problem regarding the power supply in specific on-board unit (OBUs) solutions. In detail, this paper refers to a subset of the so-called electronic toll collection (ETC) applications such as assets control and vehicle identification, where simplicity, low costs, [...] Read more.
This study addresses the general problem regarding the power supply in specific on-board unit (OBUs) solutions. In detail, this paper refers to a subset of the so-called electronic toll collection (ETC) applications such as assets control and vehicle identification, where simplicity, low costs, and maximum compactness represent the most important features. In this context, the next generation of OBUs, developed specifically with reference to such applications, will involve energy harvester-based battery-less techniques. Previous studies have mainly concentrated on performance optimization by achieving maximum energy transmission to the OBUs. This study discusses a technique suitable for both maximizing performance and minimizing the dimensions of transponder energy harvesters suitable for assets control and vehicle identification operating at 5.8 GHz. The technique assumes that an optimal source impedance exists that maximizes the energy transfer to the transponder, thus enabling its power supply in a battery-less configuration. We discuss a solution based on a compact patch antenna designed to exhibit this optimal source impedance to the RF-to-DC rectifier. This approach avoids the use of a lossy matching network. For the sake of comparison, the same function is compared with an equivalent development, which includes the interstage matching network between the antenna and the RF-to-DC rectifier. We introduce experimental results demonstrating that the ultracompact energy harvester optimized at −5 dBm of impinging power is capable of increasing both the charge current and energy efficiency from 340 to 450 μA and from 37% to 47%, respectively. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Technologies for Vehicular Communications and Autonomous Driving)
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