Road Side Unit Deployment: A Density-Based Approach

Currently, the number of vehicles increases every year, raising the probability of having accidents. When an accident occurs, wireless technologies enable vehicles to share warning messages with other vehicles by using vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications, and with the emergency services by using vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications. Regarding vehicle to infrastructure communications, Road Side Units (RSUs) act similarly to wireless LAN access points, and can provide communications with the infrastructure. Since RSUs are usually very expensive to install, authorities limit their number, especially in suburbs and areas of sparse population, making RSUs a precious resource in vehicular environments. In this paper, we propose a Density-based Road Side Unit deployment policy (D-RSU), specially designed to obtain an efficient system with the lowest possible cost to alert emergency services in case of an accident. Our approach is based on deploying RSUs using an inverse proportion to the expected density of vehicles. The obtained results show how D-RSU is able to reduce the required number of RSUs, as well as the accident notification time.

I. Introduction

Nowadays, mobility requirements make transportation systems a fundamental and relevant aspect of our lives. Hence, transportation infrastructure investments represent a considerable fraction of the total Governments investments around the globe. Moreover, the emergence of modern Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) based on vehicular networks, which add wireless communication capabilities to the current vehicles, requires the deployment of efficient roadside communication infrastructures. These infrastructure assets require a high deployment costs, and they are generally funded and managed by national governments.