Mobile Relays for Smart Cities: Mathematical Proofs

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the potential of using mobile vehicles equipped with femto-mobile Access Points as relays to enhance wireless data delivery in smart cities, providing mathematical proofs and benchmarks for this innovative architecture.

Contribution

It introduces a novel vehicle-based relay architecture with specific selection techniques and offers analytical proofs and simulations to evaluate its performance.

Findings

Maximal feasible gains in data rate and packet delivery are characterized.

Three vehicle selection techniques are proposed and analyzed.

Guidelines for future implementation are provided.

Abstract

The increasing number of connected vehicles in densely populated urban areas provides an interesting opportunity to counteract the high wireless data demands in high density and highly mobile scenarios. The idea is to support the macro base station (BS) with a secondary communication tier composed of a set of smart and connected vehicles that are in movement in the urban area. As a first step towards a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of this architecture, this paper considers the case where these vehicles are equipped with femto-mobile Access Points (fmAPs) and constitute a mobile out-of-band relay infrastructure. In particular, three techniques to select an fmAP (if more than one is available) are proposed and the maximal feasible gain in the packet delivery rate and data rate as a function of the vehicle density, average vehicle speeds, handoff overhead cost, as well as physical layer parameters is characterized. The analytical and simulation results provide a first benchmark characterizing this architecture and the definition of guidelines for its future realistic study and implementation.