The effects of quality of service on vehicular network pseudonym distribution in congested urban environments

Vehicular networks are meant to exist wherever the road will take them. This includes small towns, rural highways, suburbs, downtown urban centers, and urban highways. The density of vehicles varies greatly across these environments. This work looks at the effects of implementing Quality of Service (QoS) as well as a relatively similar method that inserts stochastic delays in pseudonym (PN) transmission in the two urban settings of a downtown grid and an urban highway, both under heavily congested conditions. The simulated results (using ns-3) are compared to previous work that examined communication suppression (as opposed to priority as in this work). Four metrics are used for method comparison: average overall background data throughput, average overall PNs distributed, maximum number of PNs distributed, and the distribution of the PNs across the vehicles as a function of need. While some of the results obtained were expected, the overall conclusion that implementing quality of service, or even a simplistic imitation, can significantly improve the overall data throughput and provide more PNs is an interesting result.