A Highway Vehicular Channel Model for OTFS Performance Evaluation

Abstract

In vehicular communications, accurate modeling of real-world radio propagation channels is essential. To this end, we propose a novel stochastic model, named Vehicular-Tapped Delay-Line (V-TDL) that accurately captures the statistical behavior of multipath channels characterized by path-dependent gains, delays, and Doppler shifts. V-TDL supports diverse traffic conditions and road geometries by generating channel instances through well-established probability distributions. Also, it effectively models the parameters of the distributions through realistic geometry-based simulations, achieving the accuracy of a ray-tracing-based model while maintaining the low complexity of a purely stochastic approach. In contrast to existing models, V-TDL accounts for the correlation between propagation paths. Our findings show that this correlation is inherent in high-speed vehicular environments and neglecting it leads to a significant overestimation of channel diversity and system performance. We compare our model to existing alternatives to assess the performance of OTFS and OFDM modulations. The results demonstrate that, unlike traditional models such as the 3GPP EVA, V-TDL captures variations in channel diversity influenced by traffic intensity and road geometry, which impact the OTFS and OFDM performance. Although OTFS is penalized by path correlation, it consistently outperforms OFDM in all evaluated vehicular environments, confirming its suitability for high-speed vehicular communication scenarios.