Outage Probability Analysis in Dual-Hop Vehicular Networks with the Assistance of Multiple Access Points and Vehicle Nodes

Abstract

Vehicular networks represent an interesting research field that encompasses connections between vehicles or connections between a vehicle and an infrastructure. In this paper, we consider dual-hop transmission using cooperative communication in vehicular networks. In our system model, multiple intermediate access points and vehicle nodes are willing to help the source vehicle forward data to the destination vehicle. From these intermediate nodes, we choose an optimal node acting as a relay using three proposed protocols. We consider the channel between a vehicle terminal and an access point node as a Rayleigh fading channel, and the channel between two vehicles as a double Rayleigh fading channel. We derive exact expressions of the end-to-end outage probability for each of the three protocols, which are then verified by Monte-Carlo simulations.