Modeling vehicle-to-vehicle line of sight channels and its impact on application-layer performance

We analyze the properties of line of sight (LOS) channels in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. We use V2V measurements performed in open space, suburban, and urban environments. By separating LOS from non-LOS data, we show that a two-ray ground reflection path loss model with effective reflection coefficient range fits the LOS channels better than the frequently used free space path loss model. Two-ray model is a better fit not only in open space, but also in suburban and urban environments. We investigate the impact of using the modified two-ray model on the application-level performance metrics: packet delivery rate, throughput, latency, and jitter. Our results show that considerable differences arise in application performance when using the modified two-ray and free space models.