Improving Propagation Modeling in Urban Environments for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Developing applications, particularly real-time applications, for wireless vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) requires a reasonable assurance of the likely performance of the network, at the least in terms of packet loss ratios and end-to-end delay. Because wireless propagation strongly influences performance, particularly in an urban environment, this paper improves on simpler propagation models for simulations by augmenting ray-tracing-derived models of propagation. In the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) component, the propagation distance is more closely calculated according to the reflection distance, the effect of roadside obstacles is included, and for the modeling of fast fading, a phase factor is introduced, all without necessarily overly increasing the computational load. In the line-of-sight (LOS) component, as well as the roadside obstacle modeling, single and double reflections from roadside buildings are added to the standard two-ray ground-propagation model, the distribution of vehicles within a street segment is used to more closely model the ground reflection ray, and the reflection coefficient is also accordingly adjusted to account for reflections from vehicles. The results have been compared with widely used measurement studies of city streets in the literature, which have confirmed the overall advantage of the improvements, particularly in the case of the NLOS component. A simulation case study shows that, in general, optimistic performance predictions of packet loss occur with the two-ray ground-propagation model when indiscriminately applied. This paper therefore represents a way forward for VANET wireless channel modeling in simulations.