Information Dissemination Delay in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Networks in a Traffic Stream

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication networks, as one of the core components of connected vehicle systems, have been granted many promising applications to address traffic mobility, safety, and sustainability. However, only a limited amount of work has been completed to understand the fundamental properties of information propagation in such systems, while comprehensively considering traffic and communication reality. Motivated by this view, this proposed research develops analytical formulations to estimate information propagation time delay via a V2V communication network formed on a one-way or two-way road segment with multiple lanes. Distinguished to previous efforts, the proposed study carefully involves several critical communication and traffic flow features in reality, such as wireless communication interference, intermittent information transmission, and dynamic traffic flow. Moreover, this study elaborately analyzes the interactions between information and traffic flow under sparse and congested traffic flow conditions. The numerical experiments based on Next-Generation Simulation field data illustrate that the proposed analytical formulations are able to provide very good estimation, with the relative error less than 5%, for the information propagation time delay on a one-way or two-way road segment under various traffic conditions. The proposed work can be further extended to characterize information propagation time delay and coverage over local transportation networks.