Employing Mobility Traces’ Findings in Deploying Roadside Units in an Urban Setup

The city infrastructure is an integral part of vehicular ad-hoc networks and intelligent transportation systems. One of the key infrastructures is the roadside unit (RSU) which can vastly improve the efficiency and coverage of data dissemination and information exchange in the vehicular network when deployed judiciously. RSU can also provide real-time traffic control, safety and road services to drivers. In this paper, we study how to strategically deploy RSUs in candidate junctions in a city layout by employing findings from taxi GPS traces such as the total daily number of vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) contacts, transmissions, transmitted file size, and the average space speed. A Consolidated Weighted Mean Approach, ConsWMA, based from four practical methods for deploying RSUs, is proposed to maximize the amount of V2I contacts. We observe that these mobility traces’ findings, when set as deployment criteria, can reduce the needed number of RSUs to be deployed and the missing V2I contacts. Simulation results show that when nine out of the 40 possible RSU locations are allocated in the first two rings of Beijing City, a 95% daily average V2I contacts is attained, thereby making information dissemination feasible. ConsWMA also provides at least 11% more V2I contacts when compared to two other deployment methods.