Impact of Weather Conditions on 5G Communication Channel under Connected Vehicles Framework

Recent research focused on improving the vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) based on the 5G technology. The V2V application is important because it will reduce the risk of accidents up to 70%-80%, improve traffic management, reduce congestion, and improve fuel consumption. Autonomous vehicles applications require a high bandwidth transmission channel where the 5G communication channel would be a reliable solution to support this disruptive technology. The dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), which is characterized with a frequency bandwidth of 5.9 gigahertz (GHz) (4G spectrum), was used as vehicular connectivity with a bandwidth of up to 200 megabytes per second (mb/s) and limited capacity. The 5G band can support connected multiple autonomous vehicles with high data rates and large bandwidth. In this study, the 5G communication channel is considered as vehicular connectivity with high bandwidth in the millimeter waves spectrum range. The quality of 5G wireless communication channels between connected vehicles possibly be affected by weather conditions such as rain, snow, fog, dust, and sand. In this paper, we estimate the effect of dust and sand on the propagation of millimeter waves. The Mie model is used to investigate the effect of dust and sand storms on the propagating mm-waves. The effect of dust and sand on the communication path loss of DSRC and 5G frequency band is investigated in the case of urban freeway and rural highway settings. Results show that the attenuation of dust and sand is changed when the particle size of sand, frequency of propagating wave, and concentration of dust are changed. Finally, the new model of link margin is created to estimate the effect of dust and sand on DSCR (5.9 GHz) and 5G (28 GHz) communication path loss.