Performance of a Link in a Field of Vehicular Interferers With Hardcore Headway Distance

The performance of vehicular networks have been largely assessed using the Poisson Point Process (PPP) to model the locations of vehicles along a road. The PPP is not always a realistic model, because it doesn't account for the safety distance a driver maintains from the vehicle ahead. In this paper, we model the inter-vehicle (or headway) distance equal to the sum of a constant hardcore distance and a random distance following the exponential distribution. Unfortunately, the probability generating functional of this point process is unknown. In order to approximate the Laplace transform of interference at the origin, we devise simple approximations for the variance and skewness of interference, and we select suitable probability functions to approximate the interference distribution. In some cases, the PPP (of equal intensity) gives a good approximation for the outage probability. When the coefficient-of-variation and the skewness of interference distribution are high, the PPP approximation becomes loose in the upper tail. Relevant scenarios are associated with urban microcells and highway macrocells with low intensity of vehicles. The predictions of PPP deteriorate with multi-antenna maximum ratio combining receiver and temporal indicators related to the performance of retransmission schemes. Our approximations generate good predictions in all considered cases.