For critical vehicular communication services, such as traffic safety and traffic efficiency, it is advisable to design systems with robustness as the main criteria, possibly at the price of reduced peak performance and efficiency. We describe a simple, low-cost method for combining the output of L directional (i.e., not omnidirectional) antennas to the input of a single-port receiver with the aim to guarantee robustness, i.e., to minimize the probability that K consecutive packets arriving from the worst-case angle-of-arrival are decoded incorrectly. To minimize complexity, the combining network does not estimate or use channel state information. The combining network consists of L-1 analog phase shifters whose phases are affine functions of time. For a general Lłe K and when the packet error probability decays exponentially with the received SNR, the optimum slopes of the affine functions can be computed by solving an optimization problem that depends on the antenna far-field functions. We provide analytical solutions for the special case of L=2 and 3 antennas, which turns out to be independent of the antenna far-field functions and placement on a vehicle. In an experimental setup consisting of two monopole antennas mounted on the roof of a Volvo XC90, the proposed combining method is shown to give significant performance gains, compared to using any one of the antennas.

The European Union funded project MICEV aims at improving the traceability of electrical and magnetic measurement at charging stations and to better assess the safety of this technology with respect to human exposure. The paper describes some limits of the instrumentation used for electrical measurements in the charging stations, and briefly presents two new calibration facilities for magnetic field meters and electric power meters. Modeling approaches for the efficiency and human exposure assessment are proposed. In the latter case, electromagnetic computational codes have been combined with dosimetric computational codes making use of highly detailed human anatomical phantoms in order to establish human exposure modeling real charging stations. Detailed results are presented for light vehicles where, according to our calculations, the concern towards human exposure is limited. Currently, the project has reached half way point (about 18 months) and will end in August 2020.