Modeling and Analysis of Inter-Vehicle Communication: A Stochastic Geometry Approach

Abstract

Modeling and Analysis of Inter-vehicle Communication: A Stochastic Geometry Approach Muhammad Junaid Farooq Vehicular communication is the enabling technology for the development of the intelligent transportation systems (ITS), which aims to improve the efficiency and safety of transportation. It can be used for a variety of useful applications such as adaptive traffic control, coordinated braking, emergency messaging, peer-to-peer networking for infotainment services and automatic toll collection etc... Accurate yet simple models for vehicular networks are required in order to understand and optimize their operation. For reliable communication between vehicles, the spectrum access is coordinated via carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) protocol. Existing models either use a simplified network abstraction and access control scheme for analysis or depend on simulation studies. Therefore it is important to develop an analytical model for CSMA coordinated communication between vehicles. In the first part of the thesis, stochastic geometry is exploited to develop a modeling framework for CSMA coordinated inter-vehicle communication (IVC) in a multilane highway scenario. The performance of IVC is studied in multi-lane highways taking into account the inter-lane separations and the number of traffic lanes and it is shown that for wide multi-lane highways, the line abstraction model that is widely used in literature loses accuracy and hence the analysis is not reliable. Since the pres5 ence of CSMA in the vehicular setting makes the analysis intractable, an aggressive interference approximation and a conservative interference approximation is proposed for the probability of transmission success. These approximations are tight in the low traffic and high traffic densities respectively. In the subsequent part of the thesis, the developed model is extended to multihop IVC because several vehicular applications require going beyond the local communication and efficiently disseminate information across the roads via multi-hops. Two well-known greedy packet forwarding schemes are studied, that impose different tradeoffs between per-hop transmission success probability and forward packet progress, namely, the most forward with fixed radius (MFR) and the nearest with forward progress (NFP). In particular, a tractable and accurate modeling framework is developed to characterize the per-hop transmission success probability and the average forward progress for vehicular networks in a multi-lane highway setup. The developed model reveals the interplay between the spectrum sensing threshold of the CSMA protocol and the packet forwarding scheme. A new performance metric is defined, denoted as the aggregate packet progress (APP), which is a dimensionless quantity that captures the tradeoffs between the spatial frequency reuses efficiency, the per-hop transmission success probability, and the per-hop forward progress of the packets. To this end, in contrary to existing studies, the results show that with proper manipulation of CSMA threshold, the MFR achieves the highest APP.