Revealing Contact Interval Patterns in Large Scale Urban Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
Contact interval between moving vehicles is one of the key metrics in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), which is important to routing schemes and network capacity. In this work, by carrying out an extensive experiment involving tens of thousands of operational taxis in Beijing city, we find an invariant character that the contact interval can be modeled by a three-segmented distribution, and there exists a characteristic time point, up to which the contact interval obeys a power law distribution, while beyond which it decays as an exponential one. This property is in sharp contrast to the recent empirical data studies based on Shanghai vehicular mobility, where the contact interval exhibits only exponential distribution.
contact interval patterns vehicular networks mobility trace