Effects of intervehicle spacing distributions on connectivity of VANET: a case study from measured highway traffic

Connectivity is an important property for information dissemination in a vehicular ad hoc network. Basically, connectivity ensures that a message from a source can be spread to reach all the vehicles in the network. Over the past few years, there have been a significant number of studies on connectivity models for vehicular ad hoc networks. Most of them rely on the key assumption that the intervehicle spacing distribution is exponential. However, based on a new empirical analysis, it is shown that during most periods of the day the intervehicle spacing distribution can better be described by other statistical distributions. This certainly affects the connectivity analysis. In this article, we discuss how the connectivity of a vehicular ad hoc network in a highway traffic scenario will change when the intervehicle spacing distribution is not exponential.