Theoretical analysis of obstruction’s influence on data dissemination in vehicular networks

Abstract

In vehicular networks (VNs), the radio propagation characteristics between two vehicles is greatly affected by the intermediate vehicles as obstruction, which has also been verified in many measurements. This property will definitely influence the routing protocol design in VNs, where the estimation of the one-hop transmission distance is of utmost importance on the relay selection. However, to the authors’ best knowledge, the obstruction’s influence has not been taken into consideration theoretically. In this paper, we propose an analytical model on the obstructed light-of-sight (OLOS) transmission distance. Based on a probabilistic method, the probability density function (PDF) of the onehop OLOS transmission distance is obtained. Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to verify our proposed analytical model.