An experimental evaluation of WiFi-based vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication in a tunnel

New automated solutions are needed, e.g., in mining industry to improve efficiency and productivity of every process. In addition, costs have to be reduced, and health and safety of employees need to be enhanced. This paper studies vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to be utilized in, e.g., mining vehicles in a tunnel to increase safety and productivity of a transportation of mining goods. The objective of the paper is to experimentally evaluate maximum achievable range of WiFi radio in a real tunnel environment including line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) links. The measurement campaign was carried out in an artificial tunnel using commercial off-the-shelf WiFi radios and antennas. The experimental system was able to reach 150 m range when applying a single data stream, and 100 m for two simultaneous data streams without loss in throughput. © 2013 IEEE.