Optimal Placement in RFID-Integrated VANETs for Intelligent Transportation System

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) plays an important role in the future development of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). VANET has provided a promising solution for building smart roads. Besides, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is more widely used in the field of urban transportation to facilitate smart parking and Electronic Toll Collection (ETC). In this paper, we consider RFID-Integrated VANETs to monitor traffic flow, detect road accidents, and help avoiding chain crush. The deployment of Road Side Units (RSUs) at roadsides in VANETs, which send the accident information to the drivers timely on the city road, enhances the road safety. This paper investigates the placement problem of Base Stations (BSs) and RFID-reader-embedded RSUs to achieve an efficient network design by considering communication constraints, coverage requirement, connectivity of tree-based architecture and network characteristic. We formulate the problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and solve it by Gurobi. Simulation results show that our proposed architecture is cost-effective and scalable to different scenarios in practice.