Experimental characterization of multi-hop communications in vehicular ad hoc network

This paper presents the performance measurement of TCP and UDP communication of a multi-hop Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) in highway and suburban areas. We use existing out-of-box IEEE 802.11b wireless cards on inter-vehicle communication between three cars. Also, we conduct experiments with three static nodes for baseline comparisons with the moving nodes. We then derive inferences in three major areas: (1) providing adjustable network parameters to manage network instabilities, (2) improving UDP efficiency by detecting out-of-touch receivers early, and (3) using speed, route, and distance to improve routing protocols.