Connectivity analysis for cooperative Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks under Nakagami fading channel

User behaviors like inter-vehicle cooperation have a significant impact on vehicular network connectivity. Intuitively, the network performance can be boosted by introducing cooperation. However, an increasing number of cooperative vehicles may result in increased interference and thus negatively affect the system performance. In this letter, we present an analytical framework to study the impact of the cooperative vehicle ratio on connectivity probability under Nakagami fading channel for both cases of independently non-identically and identically distributed interference. The lower bound of the optimal cooperative ratio is derived to explicitly reveal its relation with system parameters when interference are identically distributed. Numerical results are supplemented by simulations to demonstrate the accuracy of the analytical framework and provide useful guidelines for estimating connectivity performance in the network design for scheduling policy in vehicular networks.