A study on information throughput of inter-vehicle communications in a unidirectional traffic stream

Inter-vehicle communications (IVC) based on mobile ad hoc networks have drawn increasing research interests in recent years. In this paper, we study throughput in an IVC system along a unidirectional traffic for different traffic conditions and transmission ranges of wireless units. Here, whether a vehicle is equipped or not is random, and the probability is assumed to be the market penetration rate. We first briefly introduce the communication performance measures and our simulation platform based on network simulator 2 and traffic flow theories. We then present Monte Carlo simulation results of communication performance measures for traffic flows of two congestion levels, information source and destination at different distances, and three transmission ranges. We compare our results with those obtained through simple connectivity analysis and find that the results are consistent for low connectivity, but the throughputs by ns-2 simulations are significantly lower than the theoretical results, due to packet losses caused by signal interferences. Together with further investigations, the study could be helpful for determining and designing appropriate communication hardware and software and intelligent transportation applications.