Down the Block and Around the Corner - The Impact of Radio Propagation on Inter-Vehicle Wireless Communication

Vehicular networks are emerging as a new distributed system environment with myriad possible applications. Most studies on vehicular networks are carried out via simulation, given the logistical and economical problems with large-scale deployments. This paper investigates the impact of realistic radio propagation settings on the evaluation of VANET-based systems. Using a set of instrumented cars, the authors collected IEEE 802.11b signal propagation measurements between vehicles in a variety of urban and suburban environments. They found that signal propagation between vehicles varies in different settings, especially between line-of-sight ("Down the block") and non line-of-sight ("Around the corner") communication in the same setting.