Modeling of propagation of road hazard information in sparse vehicular ad hoc networks

In this paper, we study the propagation of road hazard information to vehicles which enter the hazard segment of a highway in a sparse 1D vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) with store-and-forward mechanism. Store-and-forward is an option for message propagation in sparse vehicular networks where connectivity is intermittent. Upon receiving the message, the vehicle becomes an informed vehicle, it carries the message for a while and then forwards it to the approaching vehicles which are about to enter the highway segment. In this way, a platoon of informed vehicles is formed. We establish an analytical model to obtain the probability that a vehicle receives the message and joins the informed platoon. Moreover, we prove that traffic dynamics increase the reception probability of messages. We find the expected message propagation delay in the platoon using the store-and-forward policy. We also show that the propagation delay in store-and-forward inter-vehicle communications is tightly related to traffic parameters such as traffic flow rate and vehicle speeds on the highway. Results show that for smaller transmission ranges, smaller platoons are formed, the expected message propagation delay in the platoon is low, and it increases very slightly as the traffic flow rate increases. But for larger transmission ranges, larger platoons are formed, the expected delay is high, and it increases remarkably with a small increase in the traffic flow rate. The impacts of some network and traffic parameters such as transmission range, speed of vehicles, and highway speed limits on the message propagation are investigated as well. Finally, the accuracy of the analytical results is evaluated by an extensive simulation study.