Line-of-Sight Obstruction Analysis for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Network Simulations in a Two-Lane Highway Scenario

Taimoor Abbas,Fredrik Tufvesson

doi:10.1155/2013/459323

Taimoor Abbas, Fredrik Tufvesson

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/459323

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Abstract

In vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) the impact of vehicles as obstacles has largely been neglected in the past. Recent studies have reported that the vehicles that obstruct the line-of-sight (LOS) path may introduce 10–20 dB additional loss, and as a result reduce the communication range. Most of the traffic mobility models (TMMs) today do not treat other vehicles as obstacles and thus cannot model the impact of LOS obstruction in VANET simulations. In this paper the LOS obstruction caused by other vehicles is studied in a highway scenario. First a car-following model is used to characterize the motion of the vehicles driving in the same direction on a two-lane highway. Vehicles are allowed to change lanes when necessary. The position of each vehicle is updated by using the car-following rules together with the lane-changing rules for the forward motion. Based on the simulated traffic a simple TMM is proposed for VANET simulations, which is capable to identify the vehicles that are in the shadow region of other vehicles. The presented traffic mobility model together with the shadow fading path-loss model can take into account the impact of LOS obstruction on the total received power in the multiple-lane highway scenarios.

Highlights

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is an emerging technology that has been recognized as a key communication paradigm for safety and infotainment applications in future intelligent transportation systems (ITS)
The traffic mobility models (TMMs) derived above is implemented in Matlab and simulations are carried out in order to analyze the movement of vehicles over time, their lane changing behavior, and the intensities by which the vehicles change states from LOS-to-OLOS and from OLOS-to-LOS states, respectively
In order to evaluate the impact of vehicle as an obstruction on V2V networks the proposed TMM together with the LOS/OLOS path-loss model given in [3] can be used in any vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) simulator

Summary

Introduction

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is an emerging technology that has been recognized as a key communication paradigm for safety and infotainment applications in future intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Most of these simulators do not consider the impact of neighboring vehicles on the packet reception probabilities To evaluate this impact in these simulators, a traffic mobility model (TMM) should be implemented having at least the ability to identify and categorize the vehicles into the following groups:. For basic packet level performance evaluations less detailed but realistic traffic flow models, for example, the optimal velocity (OV) car-following model without or with the lanechange capabilities, [12, 13], respectively, can be used in the VANET simulators. As mentioned above the TMM is capable to distinguish vehicles that are in LOS and OLOS states on a two-lane highway where the traffic flow is generated by using the lanechanging rules in the carfollowing model.

Traffic Mobility Model

Line-of-Sight Obstruction Analysis

Simulations and Results

Analytical Performance Evaluation

Summary and Conclusions