Impact of urban radio obstructions on the effectiveness of moving WAVE providers

Despite the massive research effort in the design of reliable techniques for dissemination of information in vehicular ad hoc networks, only a few works have investigated performances when considering the multichannel operation of the recently published IEEE 802.11p/WAVE standard. Moreover, most of the works focused on highway scenarios, basically due to the lack of scalable models simultaneously representing fading and obstructions, and providing a solution for realistic simulations in urban scenarios. In this paper, by exploiting a propagation model accounting for radio obstructions recently proposed in literature, the performance of IEEE 802.11p/WAVE is studied in an urban scenario where providers are mobile nodes. The achieved results show that the effectiveness of mobile providers is heavily affected by the urban obstructions (e.g., buildings), in terms of both coverage and service quality.