The Process of Information Propagation in a Traffic Stream with a General Vehicle Headway: a Revisit

Effective intervehicle communication is fundamental to a decentralized traffic information system based on mobile ad hoc vehicle networks. Here we model the information propagation process through inter-vehicle communication when the vehicle headway follows a general distribution. Equations for the expected value and variance of propagation distance are derived. In addition, we provide simple equations for the expected number of vehicles covered and the probability distribution of propagation distance. This research advances on an earlier study where the vehicle headway is assumed to follow an exponential distribution. This paper generalizes the earlier results and enables a design for robust information propagation by allowing for examination of the impact of different headway distributions. Within the new modeling framework, we also compute connectivity between two vehicles.