Power in Silence: Revealing the Stationarity of Private-owned Vehicle in Urban Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The essential features of vehicle are the foundation of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). However, behavior of private-owned vehicles, which occupy a majority in a city's transportation system, remains uncertain due to the lack of real life traces of private-owned vehicles. In this paper, the trace data of 8,900 private cars in 3 months in Changsha, China, is studied to reveal the internal features of private-owned vehicle in a city environment and provide a deeper insight into urban VANETS. To achieve this goal, we introduce a model and a range of metrics to evaluate the behavior of private-owned vehicle. The empirical results suggest that the traditional presupposition, which assumes that vehicles are constantly in motion, turns out to be incorrect for private-owned vehicles. Moreover, the results indicate that in a realistic urban scenario, the demands of VANETs for steady connections between vehicles would always be satisfied in places by private-owned parking vehicles. The outcomes thus provide fundamental guidelines and relevant parameters on design of a reliable and scalable VANET based on location in urban scenarios.