On the impact of street width on 5.9 GHz radio signal propagation in vehicular networks

Given the broad acceptance of the DSRC/WAVE protocol stack in the vehicular networking community, both the automotive industry and the scientific community are working towards so-called “day one” applications. Currently, large scale field operational tests are going on to assess the performance of developed protocols and applications. Still, the key technique for performance evaluation is simulation. Accurate microscopic simulation of Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) is needed, especially for safety critical applications. This is reflected in many recent publications trying to push this in terms of radio shadowing models, signal propagation, etc. Still, it is not fully understood how to characterize some effects given the constraints in terms of simulation time and performance. We concentrate on the fading model. Simulating freeway scenarios, the Two-Ray Interference model is considered the base line, but what about suburban and city scenarios? This paper looks into this, investigating, for the first time, the impact of the street width, i.e., distance between buildings, and its relation to the correct use of propagation models. We conducted different measurement campaigns on streets with different widths and compare the results to theoretic models that are frequently used for IVC studies. The most prominent result is that we discovered a clear difference when assessing safety applications in wide streets compared to narrow streets.