Evaluating the Impact of Transmission Power on Selecting Tall Vehicles as Best Next Communication Hop

The relatively low height of antennas on communicating vehicles in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) makes one hop and as well multi-hop Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication susceptible to obstruction by other vehicles on the road. When the transmitter or receiver (or both) is a Tall vehicle, (i.e., truck), the V2V communication suffer less from these obstructions. The transmission power control is an important feature in the design of (multihop) VANET communication algorithms. However, the benefits of choosing a Tall vehicle when transmission power is varied are not yet extensively researched. Therefore, the main contribution of this paper is to evaluate the impact of transmission power control on the improved V2V communication capabilities of tall vehicles. Based on simulations, it is shown that significant benefits are observed when a Tall vehicle is selected rather than a Short vehicle as a next V2V communication hop to relay packets. Moreover, the simulation experiments show that as the transmission power is increasing, the rate of Tall vehicles that are selected as best next V2V communication hop is significantly