Revealing contact interval patterns in large scale urban vehicular ad hoc networks

Contact interval between moving vehicles is one of the key metrics in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), which is important to routing schemes and network capacity. In this work, by carrying out an extensive experiment involving tens of thousands of operational taxis in Beijing city, we find an invariant character that the contact interval can be modeled by a three-segmented distribution, and there exists a characteristic time point, up to which the contact interval obeys a power law distribution, while beyond which it decays as an exponential one. This property is in sharp contrast to the recent empirical data studies based on Shanghai vehicular mobility, where the contact interval exhibits only exponential distribution. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.0 [Computer-Communication Networks]: General; C.4 [Performance of Systems]: [Modeling techniques, Performance attributes] Keywords Vehicular networks, contact interval patterns, mobility trace

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Yong Li, Depeng Jin, Pan Hui, Li Su, Lieguang Zeng
• Keywords: Beijing City, Communications, Computer Communication Networks, Performance Attributes, SIGCOMM 2012