Line-of-Sight Obstruction Analysis for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Network Simulations in a Two-Lane Highway Scenario

TL;DR

This paper investigates how vehicles obstruct line-of-sight in highway VANETs, modeling the impact of such obstructions on communication range and proposing a mobility model that accounts for shadowing effects.

Contribution

It introduces a traffic mobility model that identifies LOS obstructions caused by vehicles, enhancing the realism of VANET simulations in highway scenarios.

Findings

Vehicles cause 10-20 dB additional loss due to LOS obstruction.

The proposed model accurately identifies shadow regions in highway traffic.

Incorporating LOS obstruction improves simulation fidelity for VANETs.

Abstract

In vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) the impact of vehicles as obstacles has largely been neglected in the past. Recent studies have reported that the vehicles that obstruct the line-of-sight (LOS) path may introduce 10-20 dB additional loss, and as a result reduce the communication range. Most of the traffic mobility models (TMMs) today do not treat other vehicles as obstacles and thus can not model the impact of LOS obstruction in VANET simulations. In this paper the LOS obstruction caused by other vehicles is studied in a highway scenario. First a car-following model is used to characterize the motion of the vehicles driving in the same direction on a two-lane highway. Vehicles are allowed to change lanes when necessary. The position of each vehicle is updated by using the car-following rules together with the lane-changing rules for the forward motion. Based on the simulated traffic a simple TMM is proposed for VANET simulations, which is capable to identify the vehicles that are in the shadow region of other vehicles. The presented traffic mobility model together with the shadow fading path loss model can take in to account the impact of LOS obstruction on the total received power in the multiple-lane highway scenarios.