Recognizing Exponential Inter-Contact Time in VANETs

—Inter-contact time between moving vehicles is one of the key metrics in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and central to forwarding algorithms and the end-to-end delay. Due to prohibitive costs, little work has conducted experimental study on inter-contact time in urban vehicular environments. In this paper, we carry out an extensive experiment involving thousands of operational taxies in Shanghai city. Studying the taxi trace data on the frequency and duration of transfer opportunities between taxies, we observe that the tail distribution of the intercontact time, that is the time gap separating two contacts of the same pair of taxies, exhibits a light tail such as one of an exponential distribution, over a large range of timescale. This observation is in sharp contrast to recent empirical data studies based on human mobility, in which the distribution of the inter-contact time obeys a power law. By performing a least squares fit, we establish an exponential model that can accura...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Hongzi Zhu, Luoyi Fu, Guangtao Xue, Yanmin Zhu, Minglu Li, Lionel M. Ni
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2010, Inter-contact Time, Vehicular, Vehicular Ad Hoc