Parked Cars are Excellent Roadside Units

TL;DR

This paper proposes using parked cars as cost-effective roadside units in urban areas to enhance traffic safety and efficiency, leveraging self-organizing networks to create coverage maps and make deployment decisions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel self-organizing network approach that enables parked cars to serve as RSUs, reducing costs and improving coverage in urban vehicular networks.

Findings

Feasibility of using parked cars as RSUs demonstrated

Achieves excellent coverage with a small fraction of parked cars

Cost-effectiveness of the approach validated

Abstract

A comprehensive implementation of the envisioned traffic safety and efficiency applications of the IEEE 802.11p and WAVE standards assume the premise of the use of DSRC technology both as on-board units (OBUs) and as Roadside Units (RSUs). The high cost associated with RSUs, however, has so far prevented massive deployment of RSUs. Finding alternative solutions to this longstanding problem is therefore very important. In this paper, we propose a self-organizing network approach to using parked cars in urban areas as RSUs. This self-organizing network approach enables parked cars to create coverage maps based on received signal strength and make important decisions, such as if and when a parked car should serve as an RSU. Our results show the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of the proposed approach, which is able to provide excellent coverage using only a small fraction of the cars parked in a city.