Minimum transmission range in vehicular ad hoc networks over uninterrupted highways

This paper discusses the impact of the non-homogeneous distribution of vehicles on the connectivity of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). The non-homogeneous distribution of vehicles results from traffic jams caused by bottlenecks in the transportation networks and by fluctuations in vehicles' speeds. The discussion in this paper is applicable to a VANET in a long stretch of a highway with few lanes and without interruptions caused by intersections or entry and exit ramps. Our main contribution is the formulation of new relationship that provides a tighter estimate for the lower bound of the minimum transmission range (MTR) in VANETs by considering the phase separation in vehicle traffic. This relationship is an improvement to the estimate of the MTR given previously in the literature for one-dimensional networks of homogeneous node distribution