The information obtained from connected vehicle has the potential of providing local and area-wide traffic management solutions by improving safety and mobility. The reliability and the frequency of this transmitted information have to be addressed to ensure that the users can properly utilize this information to solve traffic management issues. The first part of this research investigates the area covered in space and in time by vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication in an urban network based on different market penetration rates of equipped vehicles and wireless communication coverage in TRANSIMS. The percentage of valid connected vehicles and area coverage level are used to assess the communication duration rate and spatial-temporal dispersion of equipped vehicles. Results show that both average communication duration rate and area coverage level increase as the market penetration rate and wireless communication coverage increase. The communication duration rate is more sensitive to the wireless communication coverage than the market penetration rate. However, the market penetration rate has a greater influence on spatial-temporal dispersion of equipped vehicles and the Selected Links case has higher average area coverage level than the Whole Network case. The average area coverage also varies by time of day and is sensitive to the density of traffic and to the aggregation level. Finally, the spatial-temporal dispersion of equipped vehicles increases as the density of traffic increases. The second part of this research measures the performance of V2V applications and determines the required minimum level of deployment in a large urban network. Distance of information propagation and speed estimation error are used to measure the performance of event-driven and periodic applications. For event-driven applications, wireless communication coverage is the major factor because it has a greater impact on the distance of information propagation. For periodic applications, however, the market penetration rate has a greater impact on the performance than wireless communication coverage. The performance of event-driven improves in the higher traffic density conditions of peak time while the performance of periodic application improves in the lower traffic density conditions of non-peak time. The required minimum level of deployment for each application is determined to obtain reliable traffic management solutions. These study findings will be useful for making decisions about investments in cooperative vehicles in relation to the expected increase in traffic efficiency.