Asimomiti M., Orfanou F., Vlahogianni E., Yannis G., “What is the area of influence of a vehicle on the road? Theoretical Aspects and Some empirical Findings”, Proceedings of the 10th International Congress on Transportation Research (1-3 September 2021).

Under the Cooperative Vehicles environment, each vehicle (sender) exchanges messages with its
surrounding vehicles (receivers) within the transmission range of the wireless (vehicular) network. The
area including all vehicles influencing each other is called influence area of the sender. The aim of this
work is to estimate the influence area of vehicles using the principles of information theory and highdefinition
data collected via drones. For this purpose, we computed the mutual information between
pairs of vehicles, considering their velocities as random variables. For four time periods the average
mutual information between the ego-vehicle and its neighbors is computed for 20 different radius values.
The radius that corresponds to the minimum of the average mutual information between the vehicle and
its neighbors is considered critical. The results indicate that, in most cases, road density is a critical
factor for the reliable estimation of the vehicle’s area of influence.