Evaluation of Terrain Effects on Mobile WiMax in a Vehicular Environment

Mobile WiMax is a suitable wireless technology for networked vehicular applications because of its mobility support at vehicular speeds and its inherent wide coverage, which minimizes the rate of handover and thus data loss due to disrupted communication. Apart from vehicular mobility, the terrain over which the network is deployed will also impact the network due to its effects on wireless signal propagation. In this paper, the performance of a WiMax vehicular network is investigated under different terrain environments, namely flat, urban and rural terrains, with varying building heights and densities, using realistic signal propagation models and vehicle movement patterns.