Connectivity Analysis with Co-Channel Interference for Urban Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In urban vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the complex channel environment and co-channel interference resulted in the uncertain delay of inter-vehicle packet transmission, which causes serious delay jitter. Connectivity is proposed as a key metric to describe this uncertainty. However, existing works lack a discussion of inter-vehicle connectivity in urban VANETs, particularly with regards to the process of transmitting packets between vehicles. In this paper, we analyze the connectivity probability of urban VANETs under co-channel interference with both complete and incomplete information. When the information is complete, we model the time-varying nature of co-channel interference and channel fading as delay jitter and analyze inter-vehicle connectivity in a time-varying environment. Then, when complete information is unavailable, we estimate the probability distribution of co-channel interference by combining the distribution of multiple parameters with the free space propagation model (Friss) model and Nakagami-m fading model. The expression for the connectivity performance of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) links is derived from the signal interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of the destination V2V link. Finally, we analyze the implications of various factors on connectivity, such as the transmit power of the signal, the arrival rate of packets, the number of channels and vehicles, and the distance between the transmitting vehicle and the receiving vehicle. The numerical analysis shows that co-channel interference and signal fading significantly affect inter-vehicle connectivity.