  The intelligent transportation system (ITS) offers a wide range of
applications related to traffic management, which often require high data rate
and low latency. The ubiquitous coverage and advancements of the Long Term
Evolution (LTE) technology have made it possible to achieve these requirements
and to enable broadband applications for vehicular users. In this paper, we
perform field trial measurements in various different commercial LTE networks
using software defined radios (SDRs) and report our findings. First, we provide
a detailed tutorial overview on how to post-process SDR measurements for
decoding broadcast channels and reference signal measurements from LTE
networks. We subsequently describe the details of our measurement campaigns in
urban, sub-urban, and rural environments. Based on these measurements, we
report joint distributions of base station density, cellular coverage, link
strength, disconnected vehicle duration, and vehicle velocity in these
environments, and compare the LTE coverage in different settings. Our
experimental results quantify the stronger coverage, shorter link distances,
and shorter duration of disconnectivity in urban environments when compared to
sub-urban and rural settings.
