Performance evaluation of highway mobile infostation networks

A mobile infostation network stipulates all transmissions to occur when nodes are in proximity. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of mobility on highway mobile infostation networks. Each node enters a highway section at a Poisson rate with a constant speed drawn from a known but arbitrary distribution. Both forward and backward traffic are considered. For node speed that is uniformly distributed, the fraction of connection time is independent of target node speed for backward traffic, while it increases with target node speed for forward traffic. We also extend our mobility model such that each node changes speed in each highway section. The long run fraction of connection time is dependent on the ratio of transmit range and connection time limit. Forward traffic connections yields better performance when the ratio is smaller than one and vice versa. We also compute the optimal transmit range and the corresponding data rate for both traffic types. We conclude that forward traffic connections yields much higher data rate in most scenarios.