Signal Shadowing in Simulation of Urban Vehicular Communications

Vehicular communications have been demonstrated to strongly depend on the general setting of the scenario: a heavy impact on bit-error-rate and packet-error-rate may come from physical layer phenomena which are typically simulated on software platforms different from those used for protocol validation. As a result, current protocol simulations do not take into account environmental constraints: some effects are considered by statistical models (such as Nakagami model), other ones - such as shadowing - remain uncovered phenomena. This paper proposes a simple but effective model for the shadowing raised by large buildings and blocks in urban areas: we demonstrate that the proposed solution improves the realism of simulations and significantly improves the results.