A computationally inexpensive empirical model of IEEE 802.11p radio shadowing in urban environments

We present a realistic, yet computationally inexpensive simulation model for IEEE 802.11p radio shadowing in urban environments. Based on real world measurements using IEEE 802.11p/DSRC devices, we estimated the effect that buildings and other obstacles have on the radio communication between vehicles. Especially for evaluating safety applications in the field of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), stochastic models are not sufficient for evaluating the radio communication in simulation. Motivated by similar work on WiFi measurements, we therefore created an empirical model for modeling buildings and their properties to accurately simulate the signal propagation. We validated our model using real world measurements in a city scenario for different types of obstacles. Our simulation results show a very high accuracy when compared with the measurement results, while only requiring a marginal overhead in terms of computational complexity.