Impact of buildings on vehicle-to-vehicle communication at urban intersections

Although the potential of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETS) to improve road safety and traffic efficiency for next-generation vehicular traffic system has been well investigated and proved, the performance of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, especially at urban intersections has not been clearly quantified. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of buildings on the vehicle-to-vehicle performance at urban intersections based on a profound simulation campaign. Due to the two-dimensional nature of intersection topologies, we investigate the performance of V2V communication by analyzing packet delivery ratios and packet drop rates with respect to sender and receiver's position under varying node density and intersection layout. While stationary and mobile obstacles considerably attenuate the received signal power, the results reveal that the presence of buildings could in some situations improve the performance of V2V communication by reducing co-channel interference from hidden nodes.