Exploiting Location Information to Enhance Throughput in Downlink V2I Systems

TL;DR

This paper models mmWave V2I communication as an erasure broadcast channel, analyzing how location information can improve downlink data rates in urban environments with blockage issues.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical model that incorporates location-based state estimation to enhance throughput in mmWave V2I systems.

Findings

Location information significantly improves achievable data rates.

Vehicle mobility impacts the effectiveness of location-based enhancements.

Theoretical bounds on throughput with location feedback are established.

Abstract

Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) technology, combined with millimeter wave (mmW) networks, may support high data rates for vehicular communication and therefore provides a whole new set of services. However, in dense urban environment, pedestrians or buildings cause strong blockage to the narrow beams at mmW, severely deteriorating the transmission rate. In this work, we model the downlink mmW V2I system as a simple erasure broadcast channel where the erasure (blockage) event is considered as the state of the channel. While state feedback can be obtained through protocols such as Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ), we also assume that the current state can be estimated through the location information shared by the communication peers. We evaluate, through an information-theoretic approach, the achievable downlink rate in such a system. Despite its highly theoretical nature, our result sheds light on how much the location information can contribute to improve the downlink date rate, e.g., as a function of the mobility (velocity) of the vehicles.