Empirical study on spatial and temporal features for vehicular wireless communications

Abstract

Static topology analysis is not sufficient for the dynamic vehicular ad hoc network. Understanding the evolving topology of vehicular ad hoc networkings (VANETs) caused by vehicle mobility is very important for routing protocol design and algorithm optimization. This paper explores the spatial and temporal features of vehicular network topologies based on two real taxi-trace datasets. The analysis results reveal that the whole topology of VANETs consists of a large number of small-sized connected components. Two quantitative metrics are proposed to measure the stability and location dependency of the connected components. When the communication range is greater than a threshold, a large proportion of vehicles will connect to the biggest connected component, which is relatively stable and covers the most part of the downtown region of the city. Based on the analytical results, we propose several design philosophies and new research issues for VANETs.

An Empirical Study on Evolution of the Connectivity for VANETs Based on Taxi GPS Traces

“…The third category of connectivity analysis is based on validated microscopic mobility models [13–17] and real-world taxi GPS dataset [18]. In [13], Pallis et al perform a thorough analysis of the vehicular network topology in Zurich, Switzerland.…”

“…Their results show that even though it cannot allow full network connectivity, store-carry-and-forward improves significantly the instantaneous connectivity attained through simple connected forwarding. Reference [18] explores the features of connected components for vehicular network based on two real taxi GPS traces. The analysis results reveal that the whole topology of VANETs consists of a large number of small-sized connected components.…”