Light commodity devices for building vehicular ad hoc networks: An experimental study

TL;DR

This study evaluates the real-world performance of lightweight personal devices like smartphones and tablets for vehicular ad hoc networks, revealing their effective communication ranges in outdoor urban environments.

Contribution

It provides an experimental outdoor testbed assessing real device performance for vehicular communication, highlighting practical ranges and potential for future mobility applications.

Findings

Smartphones communicate up to 75 m at 2.4 GHz

Tablets reach up to 125 m in mobility conditions

Laptops exchange multimedia over 150 m

Abstract

Vehicular communication networks represent both an opportunity and a challenge for providing smart mobility services by using a hybrid solution that relies on cellular connectivity and short range communications. The evaluation of this kind of network is overwhelmingly carried out in the present literature with simulations. However, the degree of realism of the results obtained is limited because simulations simplify real world interactions too much in many cases. In this article, we define an outdoor testbed to evaluate the performance of short range vehicular communications by using real world personal portable devices (smartphones, tablets, and laptops), two different PHY standards (IEEE 802.11g and IEEE 802.11a), and vehicles. Our test results on the 2.4 GHz band show that smartphones can be used to communicate vehicles within a range up to 75 m, while tablets can attain up to 125 m in mobility conditions. Moreover, we observe that vehicles equipped with laptops exchange multimedia information with nodes located further than 150 m. The communications on the 5 GHz band achieved an effective transmission range of up to 100 m. This, together with the optimization of the protocols used, could take our commodity lightweight devices to a new realm of use in the next generation of ad hoc mobility communications for moving through the city.