On the Instantaneous Topology of a Large-Scale Urban Vehicular Network: the Cologne Case

Despite the growing interest in a real-world deployment of vehicle- to-vehicle communication, many topological features of the resulting vehicular network remain largely unknown. We still lack a clear understanding of the level of connectivity achievable in large-scale urban scenarios, of the availability and reliability of connected multi-hop paths, and of the evolution of such features over daytime. In this paper, we investigate how the instantaneous topology of the vehicular network would look like in the case of Cologne, Germany, a typical middle-sized European city. Through a complex network analysis, we unveil the low connectivity, availability, reliability and navigability of the network, and exploit our findings to derive network design and usage guidelines.