Characterization of Intersection Topologies in Urban Areas for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

The vehicle-to-vehicle communication through exchange of information between vehicles and their neighborhood provides great opportunity to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. Consequently, safety-based V2V applications have to fulfill quality requirements in order to help drivers in critical situations on rural and motorway roads, as well as in urban and inner-city areas. However, due to the inevitable presence of stationary radio shadowing, especially in inner-city intersections, a significant contingent of message transmissions will be susceptible to recurrent signal attenuation caused by building obstructions. In this paper, we characterize the intersection topologies in urban areas by analyzing the presence and placement of buildings around intersections from a data set covering more than twenty five big cities selected worldwide. For the evaluation, we consider real data gathered from a free available online map that provides geographical data and street networks. Moreover, a simple approach allowing a meticulous characterization, and dealing with the high computational time and memory constraints is introduced.