Predicting the lifetime of repairable unicast routing paths in vehicle-formed mobile ad hoc networks on highways

Recently, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is becoming an important research topic. One goal of ITS is to exchange information between vehicles in a timely and efficient manner. In the ITS research community, inter-vehicle communications (IVC) is considered a way that may be able to achieve this goal. An information network built on top of vehicles using IVC can be viewed as a type of mobile ad hoc networks. Although several unicast routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks, how well they can operate on an IVC network is still poorly studied. If generally the lifetime of an established unicast routing path is short on an IVC network, these routing protocols will not perform well for such a network. Using several vehicle mobility traces generated by a microscopic traffic simulator, this paper analyzes the lifetime of repairable unicast routing paths existing in an IVC network. Our analytical results can help routing protocols predict the lifetime of a found path. Such a capability can lead to many useful applications.