Information Propagation Probability on Intersections in VANETS

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETS) have recently received great attention as a tool to disseminate information among vehicles with the dual purpose of increasing road safety and comfort in driving. Most of the messages that vehicles exchange are characterized by a finite lifetime period, after which, their level of usefulness is greatly reduced. Thus, an important problem in VANETS is to find efficient ways to disseminate information on the target areas before this deadline expires. The problem of information dissemination has been extensively studied in the literature and a number of solutions have been proposed. However, no previous work has addressed the problem of calculating the probability to propagate information in a certain amount of time among vehicles on intersecting roads where no static infrastructure, such as repeaters, is used. In this paper, we derive a formula which gives a lower bound on this probability. We show that the propagation probability is strongly related to the traffic conditions of the road where the information is to be transmitted. We use the derived formula to estimate, via simulations, the minimal conditions required to ensure that information propagation occurs with high probability on intersections. We validate our analytical findings with simulation’s results obtained using the VISSIM simulator.