Optimal deployment of Road Side Units in urban environments

In this paper, we address the problem of Road Side Unit (RSU) deployment in urban environments. One of the main goals in designing a Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) network is to find optimal locations for deployment of all the RSUs. The objective in our case is to cover all the road parts that have the highest car density using a limited number of wireless access points (the number of available RSUs is an input parameter in our formulation). Such design improves data delivery to moving vehicles by maximizing the network coverage and enabling higher data rates. To deal with the RSU deployment problem we propose a methodology which starts by characterizing the mobility of cars using real data traffic. In this step the parts of the road that have the highest average car density over a long period of time are identified. This data is used as input for the formulated nonlinear integer programming problem. The solution to this problem determines the optimal location for RSUs deployment given a fixed budget for networking equipment. Numerical results show that our formulation provides a more optimal solution for RSUs deployment when compared with other deployment strategies proposed in the literature.