Empirical study on spatial and temporal features for vehicular wireless communications

Abstract

Traditional networking technologies based on static topology analysis are not sufficient to the dynamic Vehicular Ad hoc Network. Understanding the network dynamics caused by vehicle mobility is very important for routing protocol design and algorithm optimization. This paper explores the spatial and temporal features based on two real taxi-trace datasets. It reveals that the whole topology of VANETs consists of a large number of small-sized connected components. When the communication range is greater than a threshold, a large proportion of vehicles will connect to a largest connected component, which covers the most part of the downtown region of the city both in on-peak hour and off-peak hour. Based on the analytical results, we propose several design philosophies and new research issues for VANETs.