Evaluation of the performance of vehicle-to-vehicle applications in an urban network

ABSTRACT Connected vehicle (CV) technology has the potential to improve safety and mobility in local and wide-area traffic management. It is necessary to measure the effects of CV applications on large and realistic networks because most of the published research in this area focus on simple hypothetical networks. In contrast, this article measures the performance of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) applications and determines the required minimum level of deployment for V2V applications in a large urban network. The information propagation distance and the speed estimation error are used as bases for measuring the performance of an event-driven and periodic application of equipped vehicles with different market penetration rates and different wireless communication coverage. As the wireless communication coverage and market penetration rates of the equipped vehicles increase, the information propagation distance increases whereas the speed estimation error decreases in our study area. For event-driven applications, the major factor is wireless communication coverage because it has a greater impact on the distance of information propagation than market penetration of the equipped vehicles does. However, the market penetration rate has a greater impact on the performance of periodic applications than wireless communication coverage does. The performance of event-driven applications improves in peak traffic times, which have high traffic-density conditions; whereas the performance of periodic applications improves in non-peak times, which have low traffic-density conditions. The minimum level of deployment needed for each application to obtain reliable traffic management solutions is determined. These study findings will be useful in the deployment of CV applications.