Evaluation of a multi-antenna switched link-based network architecture for quasi-stationary vehicle network

In recent years, there have been significant research efforts related to vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication. V2V communication was originally targeted for safety-related applications but interest in other possible application areas including communication support for traffic management has increased. This paper describes a system architecture that can provide high throughput and rapid data dissemination in vehicular networks. While vehicle mobility results in frequent routing changes, we expect that in a highway scenario vehicles will maintain relative positions and speeds for some time resulting in a quasi-stationary network configuration. The proposed approach system is intended to be robust and work with a very simple protocol specification taking advantage of the quasi-stationary behavior of vehicle networks. It also addresses some of the major concerns facing multi-hop vehicular communication. We previously proposed an architectural framework for achieving a vehicle network that employs dynamically switched directional links [30]. In this article we provide preliminary simulations results that highlight the scalability, reliability and latency benefits provided by the switched directional links for a given baseline vehicle configuration emulating a quasi-stationary network. A significant improvement in metrics such as PDR and latency is observed.