A realistic path loss model for real-time communication in the urban grid environment for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

Wireless signal transmission is influenced by environmental effects. These effects have also been challenging for Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) in real-time communication. More specifically, in an urban environment, with high mobility among vehicles, a vehicle’s status from the transmitter can instantly trigger from line of sight to non-line of sight, which may cause loss of real-time communication. In order to overcome this, a deterministic signal propagation model is required, which has less complexity and more feasibility of implementation. Hence, we propose a realistic path loss model which adopts ray tracing technique for VANET in a grid urban environment with less computational complexity. To evaluate the model, it is applied to a vehicular simulation scenario. The results obtained are compared with different path loss models in the same scenario based on path loss value and application layer performance analysis. The proposed path loss model provides higher loss value in dB compared to other models. Nevertheless, the performance of vehicle-vehicle communication, which is evaluated by the packet delivery ratio with different vehicle transmitter density verifies improvement in real-time vehicle-vehicle communication. In conclusion, we present a realistic path loss model that improves vehicle-vehicle wireless real-time communication in the grid urban environment.