01628140

Component

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) have been envisioned to enable a variety of important applications for road traffic, and will open up some unprecedented opportunities to change the way road traffic operates. Connectivity is fundamentally required for VANETs to secure reliable dissemination of information among networked vehicles for the purpose of various VANETs applications. Due to the high mobility of vehicles, the topology of a VANET rapidly changes and connectivity is not always guaranteed especially in the case of traffic sparsity and low market penetration of networked vehicles. Thus, it is essential to examine the connectivity issue before deploying VANETs. The probabilistic distributions of inter-vehicle spacing play a crucial role in the study of connectivity. It was quite often in previous studies to use some priori distributions to model inter-vehicle spacing, or examine possible distributions via some queueing models that are not very intimate to traffic reality, or reply on some assumptions that are not very practical. This paper re-examines this issue analytically and figures out with a general set of conditions that under the free flow condition the distribution of the spatial number of vehicles along a highway is Poisson, with the corresponding inter-vehicle spacing exponentially distributed.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB45 Standing Committee on Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics.

01618707

17-02574

English

11p

2017

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References

Mobile communication systems; Poisson distributions; Stochastic processes; Traffic distribution; Traffic models; Vehicular ad hoc networks

Data and Information Technology; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Vehicles and Equipment

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-02574

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 10:58AM