Performance evaluation of highway mobile infostation networks

A mobile infostation network stipulates all transmissions to occur when nodes are in proximity. We evaluate the effect of mobility on highway mobile infostation networks. Each node enters a highway segment at a Poisson rate with a constant speed drawn from a known but arbitrary distribution. Both forward and reverse traffic are considered. For node speed that is uniformly distributed, the expected fraction of connection time, or expected number of connections in queueing terminology, is independent of observer node speed for reverse traffic, while it increases with observer node speed for forward traffic. We also extend our mobility model such that each node changes speed at each highway segment. The long run fraction of connection time of an observer node is dependent on the ratio of transmit range and connection time limit. Forward traffic connection yields better performance when the ratio is small and vice versa. We also compute the optimal transmit range and the corresponding data rate for both traffic types. We conclude that forward traffic connections yield much higher data rate in most scenarios.