Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), an emerging technology, use vehicles as nodes to form a mobile ad hoc network for the dissemination of safety and entertainment messages. The thesis provides a scheme for the fast propagation of messages in VANETs and evaluates the impact of vehicles as obstacles on signal propagation. An improved scheme for intermediate node selection in DBA-MAC (Dynamic Backbone Assisted MAC) is proposed, which consists of a CW (Contention Window) constraint scheme and an updated criterion of suitability. A performance comparison shows that messages in the proposed scheme propagate faster than in DBA-MAC. The CW constraint scheme is also applicable in VANET protocols which adapt the CW mechanism to communicate the suitability of vehicles for acting as intermediate nodes. Additionally, the mathematical models for DBAMAC and the proposal are established, which indicate the probability of candidates to be chosen over alternatives in the intermediate node selection. A novel metric - delay taking into account the effect of formation time(DEFT) - is proposed. DEFT combines the network formation time and propagation delay. It shows the impact of network formation on propagation latency. The configuration for optimal performance can be acquired using the proposed DEFT. In order to evaluate the proposals, a novel distribution of vehicle location is proposed. In the proposed distribution, the security distances between adjacent vehicles in the same lane are considered. The estimation of vehicles’ location can be more practical and accurate using the proposed distribution. In the wide body of the VANET literature, it is assumed that all the vehicles within the radio range of a transmitter are able to receive the signal. Yet, in practice, the vehicles as obstacles between the transmitter and the receiver affect the signal propagation significantly. This thesis presents the impact of these obstacles on the network connectivity and system performance of the protocols. The results and the analysis show that neglecting obstacles in practice leads to a significant degree of error in the estimation of system performance. In practice, tall vehicles forward messages in a more efficient way than do lower vehicles since they are free from the obstacle effect. An improved scheme is proposed, in which the height of vehicles is used as a factor to determine their suitability for message forwarding.

Given a family of recognizable languages L1, . . . ,Lm and recognizable languages K1 ⊆ K2, the relative inclusion star height problem means to compute the minimal star height of some rational expression r over L1, . . . ,Lm satisfying K1 ⊆ L(r) ⊆ K2. We show that this problem is of elementary complexity and give a detailed analysis its complexity depending on the representation of K1 and K2 and whether L1, . . . ,Lm are singletons.