University of California Transportation Center

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in inter-vehicle communications (IVC) based on wireless networks to collect and distribute traffic information in various Intelligent Transportation Systems applications. In this paper, we study the performance of IVC under various traffic and communication conditions by means of simulation analysis. We consider impacts of shock waves, transportation network, traffic densities, transmission ranges, and multiple information sources. We used a state-of-the-art communication network simulator ns-2 to measure the probability of success (success rate) and message delivery ratio (MDR) for flooding-based IVC communication. For reasonable realism in the deployment scenario, we assume that only a partial set of vehicles on the road are equipped with communication devices, according to the market penetration rate. A Monte-Carlo simulation method is used, with repeated random sampling of IVC-equipped vehicles. The results indicate how these parameters can impact the performance of IVC communications. By comparing the flooding based approach (theoretical and simulation) and simulation results using AODV (Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector), we conclude the importance of traffic environment and network protocol in determining the MDR for IVC communication.