Evaluating Automotive Antennas for Cellular Radio Communications Cellular connectivity plays an important role for the future development of automated and connected driving and intelligent traffic. An internet connection based on a 5G network can offer new services as entertainment (media streaming) or traffic information for improved navigation and cruising. Development and testing automotive antenna designs is time consuming and expensive. An open question is the evaluation of different antennas within a realistic environment. To fill this gap and facilitate optimal antenna design we introduce three scoring indicators to compare automotive antennas for cellular mobile communications and estimate their performance. This approach can be applied both to measured data and simulation results. The indicators help to make decisions on the type of integrated antenna by considering throughput as well as network coverage.

Overtheair emulation of a twopath model for automotive LTE system performance testing Overtheair testing is, in combination with the concept of radio channel emulation, a feasible solution for the evaluation of automotive radio systems during every stage of development. Suitable and representative test scenarios need to be investigated, since it is impossible to completely test the multitude of potential radio environments, and real drive tests are very expensive, time consuming, and hardly reproducible. This paper proposes a basic twopath propagation model as a basis for performance testing because of its relevance in wireless communications and the potential to adjust worstcase transmission conditions. The model has been successfully implemented in our multipurpose test facility. The implementation has been verified by interference measurements in the signal domain at RF level. Measured values compare favourably with expectation. Application oriented verification has been achieved by creating a functional LTE link in our shielded anechoic chamber and has been used to conduct endtoend data throughput tests. The measured data throughput follows the expected interference pattern.