Instantaneous Connectivity of One-dimensional Inter-vehicle Communication Networks for General Traffic Conditions

Rapid developments in various frontiers of telecommunications and information technologies could enable the development of next-generation Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that rely on inter-vehicle communications (IVC) to disseminate time-critical and location-based traffic information. In this study, we present a new model for computing the instantaneous multihop connectivity and end node probability for vehicles on a line in a transportation network, where traffic density may be non-uniform, and vehicles’ positions may depend on each other. With given locations of all vehicles, the proposed model can be used to estimate the connectivity when vehicles have different probabilities to be equipped. With the model, we study how the distribution patterns of vehicles can affect information propagation, formulate the choice of the location of a road-side station as an optimization problem, and examine the time-dependent connectivity properties on an inhomogeneous ring road. The new model is simple in formulation and computation and are more general than existing models.