On the feasibility of multi-hop communication in a realistic city scenario

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are about to enter the market in the upcoming years. While direct message exchange is limited to a few hundred meters and mostly line-of sight, multi-hop forwarding can significantly extend the communication range. In this paper, the influence of network density and vehicle distribution on multi-hop communication in VANETs is investigated using a model of the city of Luxembourg. Introducing an idealistic reference routing we identify the need for high penetration rates to achieve acceptable reliability independent of the selected routing protocol. A comparison with Greedy forwarding shows its weaknesses to select proper next hop candidates when the number of equipped vehicles increases.