Macroscopic Modeling of Spatiotemporal Information Flow Propagation Wave under Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

The speed of the information flow propagation wave is a fundamental characteristic to analyze vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications based traffic systems. It depends on the density of vehicles equipped with a V2V communication capability, the V2V communication constraints, and the traffic flow dynamics. This study proposes an integrated model consisting of integro-differential equations to describe the information flow propagation mechanism and a partial differential equation to describe the traffic flow dynamics. It can directly incorporate the success rate of communication with distance and interference as a probability density function, and provides a closed-form solution for the speed of the information flow propagation wave. Numerical simulation experiments are used to analyze the performance of the analytical solution. The results show that the analytical solutions are consistent with the average speed of the information flow propagation wave provided by the numerical experiments.