On the characteristics of information dissemination paths in vehicular ad hoc networks on the move

Recently, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is becoming an important research topic. One goal of ITS is to disseminate important information among vehicles in a timely and efficient manner. In the ITS research community, inter-vehicle communications (IVC) is considered a way that may be able to achieve this goal. An information network built on top of vehicles using IVC can be viewed as a type of mobile ad hoc networks. Although several information dissemination protocols for mobile ad hoc networks have been proposed, how well they can be applied to a vehicle-formed mobile ad hoc network is still poorly studied. Without doubt, no matter what methodology is taking for designing an IVC-suitable information dissemination protocol, the protocol performance is fundamentally limited by the potential degree of physical-link connectivity. Thus, in this paper, some potential physical-link attributes of IVC networks, such as the lifetime of a transmission path between two vehicles, are studied based on reasonable vehicle traces generated by a microscopic traffic simulator. Although no specific protocol is focused on in this paper, the studied results can potentially contribute to performance improvement and/or protocol efficiency for any existed or developing protocol.