Empirical path loss model for vehicle-to-vehicle IoT device communication in fleet management

Vehicle fleet management systems can monitor and provide accurate vehicle management information, such as location, idle time, speed, and mileage (among others). This information can be transmitted using direct communication between cars and base stations. However, this concept assumes that vehicles are served by a cellular base station at all times, which is not always the case. In order to fulfil the vision of Internet-of-Things (IoT), where “things” self-manage themselves, there needs to be a mechanism for vehicles to transmit important information in cases where base stations are not available. In these cases, IoT sensing devices can be used to establish device-to-device mesh communication networks between vehicles where no cellular service is available and act as routers to deliver information to destination nodes available within cellular coverage. In these cases, design and deployment of such systems rely on proper modeling and characterization of signal propagation between the in-vehicle-to-in-vehicle communication of IoT devices. This study proposes models that can be used for such design and in similar environments with the end goal of improving the quality of service of these systems and get them closer to the vision of self-management. The proposed models are compared with theoretical models which deviate by 6 to 23%.