Designing the Communication Infrastructures for Democratizing the Coverage Time of Connected Vehicles

Vehicular communication can be highly improved by providing network access points distributed along with the road network. Such access points for vehicles are commonly referred to as roadside units and provide a backbone integrating the whole vehicular network. However, to avoid wasting resources and maximizing network efficiency, the locations where these units are installed need special attention in such networks' design. In this work, we propose two novel strategies (Partial Time Information (PTI) and Maximum Coverage Time (MCT)) to deploy a predefined number of roadside units seeking to maximize the number of distinct vehicles crossing covered areas during a given time threshold. Instead of relying on the full trajectory of vehicles, which may incur privacy issues, the PTI strategy utilizes duplicate coverage time ratios between urban regions to infer the best locations for deploying the roadside units, while the MCT operates in the lack of mobility information. As a baseline, we consider the FPF strategy, which regards a Markovian approach for the flow of vehicles. Simulation results based on the data traffic set of Cologne, Germany demonstrate that the proposed approaches increase the vehicle to infrastructure connection time in comparison to FPF.