In recent years inter-vehicle communication (IVC) has aroused much interest. By providing information such as a vehicle's speed, braking condition and steering condition to other vehicles within a zone of relevance (ZOR), an increase in road safety is predicted. In this paper the performance of a multi-hop network using infra-red as the communication medium is presented. For this system, the need to pass data via other vehicles (multi-hop) has been recognized as crucial to communicate with vehicles travelling side by side, as well as to provide an alternate path for data when two vehicles cannot communicate directly. To overcome poor performance when the network becomes crowded it is proposed to assign slots based on position in the cell, creating two virtual mini-cells within each cell. Experimental results using infra-red communication between vehicles are applied to a multi-hop network to examine the performance of the multi-hop multi-lane network as traffic increases. The effectiveness of this method of assigning slots and good performance of the system was confirmed by computer simulation.
Abstract