On the Impact of Building Attenuation Models in VANET Simulations of Urban Scenarios

Buildings are important elements of cities for VANETs, since these obstacles may attenuate communications between vehicles. Consequently, the impact of buildings has to be considered as part of the attenuation model in VANET simulations of urban scenarios. However, the more elaborated the model, the more information needs to be processed during the simulation, which implies longer processing times. This complexity in simulations is not always worth it, because simplified channel models occasionally offer very accurate results. We compare three approaches to model the impact of buildings in the channel model of simulated VANETs in two urban scenarios. The simulation results for our evaluation scenarios of a traffic-efficiency application indicate that modeling the influence of buildings in urban areas as the total absence of communication between vehicles gives similar results to modeling such influence in a more realistic fashion and could be considered a conservative bound in the performance metrics.