Modelling of multi-hop inter-vehicular path formation for connecting far vehicles to RSUs

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks have been receiving significant interest during the past years as they support both safety and non-safety applications for passengers commuting onboard smart vehicles. Vehicles may communicate with each others for the purpose of sharing information. Moreover, they may be privileged by Broadband Internet access as well as other services provisioned by stationary Roadside Units (RSUs) deployed along the roadways. When a vehicle leaves the coverage range of an RSU, it enters a dark area. However, it may still maintain connectivity with the RSU through multi-hop communication with other cooperative vehicles serving as intermediate relays. In this paper, we study the probability of establishing a connectivity path between a far away vehicle residing in a dark area and an RSU deployed along a roadway experiencing free-flow traffic conditions. For this purpose, we establish a stochastic mathematical framework which jointly considers the availability of intermediate relay vehicles as well as their ability to capture the communication channel in a contention-based MAC environment. Extensive simulations were conducted for the purpose of validating the derived expressions and examining the throughput performance of the system.