Abstract
Inter-vehicle communication (IVC) network has become an important topic in research for its potential advantages in enhancing traffic security and efficiency. This paper investigates the communication performance of IVC networks in two lane bidirectional traffic streams. By changing the transmission range of communication units and penetration rate of equipped vehicles, we studied several performance measures, such as average throughput, end to end delay and number of hops. The simulations were conducted in network simulator 2 (ns-2) with Monte Carlo method and the equipped vehicles were generated randomly according to the penetration rate. From the simulation results we found that the bidirectional traffic streams indeed affect each other's communication performance. In addition, the average throughput and end to end delay can be improved by increasing the transmission range and penetration rate. The study could help to fix some network parameters such as transmission range to advance the communication performance of IVC networks.