The Evaluation of the V2VUNet Concept to Improve Inter-vehicle Communications

Due to the high mobility behavior in inter-vehicle communications (IVC), packet forwarding among vehicles becomes an important issue. For IVC in a traditional packet forwarding setting, it was observed that the ratio between packets received and the packets transmitted is often very low, sometimes less than 50%. This ratio is highly influenced by the environment, especially by road topologies and obstructions (e.g., buildings or overpasses). Further influences encompass the number of driving vehicles on streets offering burdens for the IVC as well as serving as relay candidates. In order to improve IVC this paper introduces a Vehicular-to-Vehicular Urban Network (V2VUNet) to overcome inevitable obstructions and frequent network changes by selecting the best relay candidate. The V2VUNet implemented was evaluated in an IVC with the focus on three-dimensional road topologies including overpasses with a different number of driving lanes. The result shows that the developed V2VUNet provides about 30% better packet transmission performance compared to traditional packet transmission in IVC.