An inter-vehicle network using short-range communications is considered, where the vehicles are capable of temporarily establishing communication links with adjacent ones, by exploiting the space division multiplexing provided by directional antennas. Though the network topology is dynamically variable, the variations follow the traffic dynamics, which is orders of magnitude slower than that of the teletraffic; this fact makes it conceivable to consider finding the shortest routes within an ad-hoc network (e.g., within a platoon), which will then be used to convey important information on the traffic conditions in a multi-hop fashion. The paper defines some possible relevant metrics to be used in the calculation and presents and discusses numerical results on their application. (A*)
Abstract