A Line-of-Sight probability model for VANETs

Simulation has become an important method for the evaluation of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) applications and protocols. These simulations often work on the link level with simulation time far off from wall clock time, making them impracticable to be deployed for the performance analysis of real hardware in Hardware-In-The-Loop (HIL) environments or prototype vehicles. Probabilistic communication models can help in this regard, however often suffer from considerably lower accuracy than link-level simulations. It was shown that determining whether a communication link is of Line-of-Sight (LOS) or Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) nature greatly increases the quality of probabilistic communication models. This paper presents such an LOS probability model for VANETs in urban and rural environments. We find that typical urban environments such as rural, urban, and industrial areas show similar characteristics across different German and European cities. We utilize this to derive a probabilistic LOS model that reliably predicts LOS constellations and outperforms related work. Our model therefore enables the development of accurate probabilistic packet success or packet arrival rate models to investigate VANET technology in real-time environments.