The Steady-State Distribution of Rehealing Delay in an Intermittently Connected Highway VANET

A vehicular ad hoc network may suffer from intermittent connectivity. When a network disconnection occurs during message delivery, it can be restored by a temporal relay, i.e., a store-carry-forward (SCF) relay. There have been numerous previous works discussing the rehealing delay, which is the delay required to restore a network disconnection by an SCF relay. However, most of them neglect the dependence of the restoration of a network disconnection on that of the previous one. As a result, their results would become invalid when a long-distance delivery of messages is necessary. To address this problem, we discuss how the restoration of a network disconnection can be affected by that of the previous one, from which an embedded Markov chain is developed to obtain the steady-state probability distribution of rehealing delay. Simulation results show that our analysis is highly accurate, as compared to previous works.