Vehicles or Pedestrians: On the gNB Placement in Ultradense Urban Areas

This paper tackles the problem of base stations placement to guarantee line of sight connectivity to vehicles in urban areas, when high frequency communications (mmWave or TeraHertz) are used. Our novel methodology takes advantage of vehicular traffic simulation to generate a realistic demand model for vehicles in urban areas. Then, through a bounded error heuristic, find the maximal coverage that can be achieved with a given density of base stations. The heuristic is implemented on GPU and used to evaluate the coverage in a densely urbanized area in the city of Luxembourg. Our results indicate that a reasonably low density (20 base stations per km2) is sufficient to provide coverage for vehicles in urban environments. However, optimizing solely on vehicles negatively affects the coverage of pedestrians.