Spatial Propagation of Information in Vehicular Networks

There has been increasing interest in building an information infrastructure for mobile vehicles in surface transportation systems that principally rely on vehicle-to-vehicle (v2v) communications. The various network architectures proposed for this purpose have unique characteristics that distinguish them from other systems. However, only a limited amount of work has been completed to understand the fundamental network properties of such systems. In this paper, we present analytical models to study the spatial propagation of information in a highly mobile v2v ad hoc network. We explore both one- and two-way vehicle traffic scenarios. These models can help better understand data dissemination in this environment. Our results show that information propagation depends on some vehicle traffic characteristics, e.g., vehicle density, average vehicle speed, and relative vehicle movement. These models lead to some interesting discoveries, e.g., a message can propagate in the opposite direction as the vehicle traffic flow and can propagate much faster than vehicle movement.