Performance Analysis for Uplink Transmission in User-Centric Ultra-Dense V2I Networks

User-centric ultra-dense network (UDN) has been considered a key enabler of high data rate and high reliable vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. In this paper, an analytical framework is developed based on stochastic geometry to characterize the uplink V2I transmission performances, in terms of the outage probability, the average vehicle throughput and the average spatial throughput, particularly resolving two important but not well-understood factors in such networks: the spatial correlation in the interference powers among the cooperative roadside units (RSUs) as caused by the shared set of co-channel vehicles, and the combined vertical distance (CVD) owing to the lane width and the antenna height difference between the vehicle and the RSUs. Exact analytical expressions of the outage probability are derived for the general multiple association cases, a far-distance approximation method is introduced to reduce the computational complexity, and lower and upper bounds are obtained corresponding to two extreme assumptions of the spatial interference correlation. We show that the impacts of the spatial interference correlation can be significant and ignoring the correlation can lead to non-optimal system deployment, and that the far-distance approximation can approach well with the exact results. Meanwhile, although CVD diminishes the V2I uplink transmission performances, the diminution can be mitigated through RSU cooperation.