Empirical study on spatial and temporal features for vehicular wireless communications

Abstract

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.