Line-of-Sight Obstruction Analysis for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Network Simulations in a Two-Lane Highway Scenario

In vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) the impactof vehicles as obstacles has largely been neglected in the past. Recent studies have reported that the vehicles that obstruct theline-of-sight (LOS) path may introduce 10–20 dB additionalloss, and as a result reduce the communication range. Most ofthe traffic mobility models (TMMs) today do not treat othervehicles as obstacles and thus cannot model the impact ofLOS obstruction in VANET simulations. In this paper the LOSobstruction caused by other vehicles is studied in a highwayscenario. First a car-following model is used to characterizethe motion of the vehicles driving in the same direction on atwo-lane highway. Vehicles are allowed to change lanes whennecessary. The position of each vehicle is updated by using thecar-following rules together with the lane-changing rules for theforward motion. Based on the simulated traffic a simple TMMis proposed for VANET simulations, which is capable to identifythe vehicles that are in the shadow region of other vehicles. The presented traffic mobility model together with the shadowfading path-loss model can take into account the impact ofLOS obstruction on the total received power in the multiple-lanehighway scenarios