Quality-supporting duration for dual-hop vehicle-to-vehicle cooperative communications

In this paper, we provide a measure of reliable vehicle-to-vehicle communication, which is referred to quality-supporting duration (QSD). QSD is defined as a maximum allowable time that ensures a given outage probability target. When designing frame length or feedback interval for road safety systems, QSD can be used as a reference time interval during which the reliable communication is possible. We investigate QSD in cooperative communication environments. Both a single-relay case and a multiple-relay case are considered. Each vehicle is assumed to have a random velocity that is uniformly distributed and it is unchanged during the time span considered in the paper. But the distance between vehicles are time-varying since the speeds are different form vehicle to vehicle. The outage probability of vehicle-to-vehicle networks environment hence depends on the time-varying distance and is also time-varying. We first express speed-average outage probability. With numerical investigation, we show QSD against the initial distance, the speed range of the vehicles and the number of cooperative relays, respectively. QSD decreases when the initial distance increases or the speed range increases. But QSD increases when the number of cooperative relays increases.