Evaluation of Mesh-Enhanced VANET Deployment Models

While wireless vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are attracting greater commercial interest, current research has not adequately captured the real-world urban constraints in VANET deployment. In this work, we evaluated the feasibility and benefits of deploying a VANET in urban settings with a wireless mesh backbone infrastructure. We modeled urban street layouts, traffic rules, RF attenuation due to physical obstacles, and the use of multiple radio channels Our results indicate that the performance improves in dense networks when routing decisions are limited to mesh nodes, whereas it improves in sparse networks when mobile nodes also participate in routing. We also show that the effect of signal attenuation due to physical obstacles can potentially be parametrized in simulations using empirical real-world measurements.