Data Dissemination Performance in P2P-Based Vehicular Communications for Smart City Environments

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks, as well as vehicular networks, have been extensively studied in the literature. However, the statistical characteristics of connection times among vehicles on the performance of a P2P network to allow Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications have been largely overlooked. Specifically, the periods that vehicles remain connected to neighboring vehicles to directly communicate among them in different road characteristics (urban or highway) and road traffic conditions (low, medium, or high) are of main importance for the adequate performance of a P2P system. Indeed, these connection times establish the average number of peers and hence the bandwidth available in the communication system. These times have not been studied nor characterized before for the purpose of calculating the download probability and average download times, which are calculated in this work using a teletraffic analysis. We also present simulation results considering the CSMA/CA random access scheme established in the IEEE 802.11p communication protocol for V2V communications to investigate the effect of the random access protocol on the system performance.