IVC in Cities: Signal Attenuation by Buildings and How Parked Cars Can Improve the Situation

We study the effectiveness of Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) in urban and suburban environments at low node densities, with a particular focus on cooperative awareness and traffic safety. The recently standardized DSRC/WAVE protocol suite defines a platform for such applications, which mainly focus on beaconing, i.e., periodic 1-hop-broadcast. In general, such safety relevant transmissions are defined by time criticality. One of the major problems to be solved is how to tackle the very difficult and complex radio signal attenuation due to buildings and other obstacles, especially in cities. Typical concepts address this problem by requiring all vehicles to also act as relays or by using dedicated Roadside Units (RSUs). We show how such systems may be operated more efficiently and how the situation can be further improved by relying on parked vehicles in addition to, or as a replacement for, RSUs. Given the fact that the U.S. DOT is already evaluating whether to make DSRC mandatory for new cars, wide availability of radio equipped cars can be predicted; also the impact in terms of energy consumption is negligible. We performed an extensive set of simulations to evaluate the negative impact of buildings at low node densities and the benefit of our proposal. Our results clearly indicate that situation awareness can be significantly improved. When disseminating safety critical events in a realistic scenario, reasonable numbers of parked cars can increase cooperative awareness by up to 25%, a factor which requires an unreasonably costly number of RSUs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose the utilization of parked vehicles as relay nodes for safety applications in vehicular networks.