Optimal Gateway Placement and Reliable Internet Access in Urban Vehicular Environments

Internet of Vehicles requires reliable Inter-Vehicular communications. Such a requirement is challenging since the wireless communication channel is very erroneous and lossy in city environments. A lot of solutions for connecting vehicles to the internet have been proposed. However, existing multi-hop gateway discovery solutions do not consider, a key issue, the unreliability of broadcast in city environments. In this paper, our objective is to find out the minimum communication hops, with very high reliability (e.g., 97%), to gateways. To accomplish this, we model the gateway placement problem (called GP) as a k-center optimization problem. We solve it in O(n^2*log(n)) time using a (2-1) dimension reduction technique. We make use of M-HRB to discover reliable multi-hop paths to gateways. Simulation results demonstrate that applying M-HRB with GP provides high packet reception rate and generates smaller end-to-end delay compared to existing solutions. Furthermore, our proposal makes efficient use of wireless channel bandwidth.