Capacity of Cooperative Vehicular Networks with Infrastructure Support: Multi-user Case

TL;DR

This paper presents an analytical framework for vehicular network capacity, demonstrating how cooperative strategies combining V2I, V2V, mobility, and infrastructure can significantly enhance data dissemination, especially with low VoI proportions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cooperative communication strategy and provides a closed-form capacity expression, guiding infrastructure deployment and strategy design.

Findings

Capacity increases with cooperative strategies.

Significant capacity boost when VoI proportion is low.

Analytical model links capacity to key network parameters.

Abstract

Capacity of vehicular networks with infrastructure support is both an interesting and challenging problem as the capacity is determined by the inter-play of multiple factors including vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, density and mobility of vehicles, and cooperation among vehicles and infrastructure. In this paper, we consider a typical delay-tolerant application scenario with a subset of vehicles, termed Vehicles of Interest (VoIs), having download requests. Each VoI downloads a distinct large-size file from the Internet and other vehicles without download requests assist the delivery of the files to the VoIs. A cooperative communication strategy is proposed that explores the combined use of V2I communications, V2V communications, mobility of vehicles and cooperation among vehicles and infrastructure to improve the capacity of vehicular networks. An analytical framework is developed to model the data dissemination process using this strategy, and a closed form expression of the achievable capacity is obtained, which reveals the relationship between the capacity and its major performance-impacting parameters such as inter-infrastructure distance, radio ranges of infrastructure and vehicles, sensing range of vehicles, transmission rates of V2I and V2V communications, vehicular density and proportion of VoIs. Numerical result shows that the proposed cooperative communication strategy significantly boosts the capacity of vehicular networks, especially when the proportion of VoIs is low. Our results provide guidance on the optimum deployment of vehicular network infrastructure and the design of cooperative communication strategy to maximize the capacity.