Roadside unit deployment for information dissemination in a VANET

Abstract

A VANET is a network where each node represents a vehicle equipped with wireless communication technology. This type of network enhances road safety, traffic efficiency, Internet access and many others applications to minimize environmental impact and in general maximize the benefits for the road users. This paper studies a relevant problem in VANETs, known as the deployment of RSUs. A RSU is an access points, used together with the vehicles, to allow information dissemination in the roads. Knowing where to place these RSUs so that a maximum number of vehicles circulating is covered is a challenge. We model the problem as a Maximum Coverage with Time Threshold Problem (MCTTP), and use a genetic algorithm to solve it. The algorithm is tested in four real-world datasets, and compared to a greedy approach previously proposed in the literature. The results show that our approach finds better results than the greedy in all scenarios, with gains up to 11 percentage points.