The exchange of data among vehicles can decrease the likelihood of accidents and improve freeway capacity. The relaying of data between vehicles which are not directly able to communicate via a third party (multi-hopping of data) further improves the capabilities of inter-vehicle communication. In this paper a multi-lane multi-hop moving vehicle system is examined. The improvement of multi-hopped systems over single hopped systems is shown. Recently there has been an interest in multi-hop for solving problems of narrow beam systems such as communicating with vehicles to the side. The effects of widening the beam width is examined. It is shown that widening the beam width for more than 40/spl deg/ does not produce appreciable gains in the network performance. Effects of traffic density on the performance of the multi-hopping network is also examined in two traffic situations: a free flowing traffic situation and a traffic jam situation.
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