Connectivity dynamics in vehicular freeway scenarios

Vehicular ad-hoc networks have received increasing interest in the last years for their potential to support a variety of services and applications in order to improve driving safety or traffic efficiency and to provide information and entertainment to the users. This paper focuses on the analysis of some connectivity characteristics in dynamic vehicular communication scenarios, that are important for the design and the performance and dependability assessment of such applications. In particular, we focus on the process describing the occurrence of encounters between cars in single and multi-hop scenarios. Using analytical proofs and simulation experiments, it is shown that under some key assumptions on the movements and the placement of the cars, this process can be approximated as a stationary or a nonhomogeneous Poisson process. Results are also provided concerning the duration of connections in the ad-hoc domain.