Design of analytical model and algorithm for optimal roadside AP placement in VANETs

The emerging vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) enables vehicles to access the Internet through roadside access points (APs). An important issue in system deployment is determining how many roadside APs shall be installed on a road. However, the existing works fail to provide rigorous and accurate analysis for VANETs. In this paper, we propose a general structure for Internet access in VANETs. It allows both real-time traffic and delay-tolerant traffic to be delivered to users in the most efficient ways. An analytical model is also proposed to analyze the system performance with random arrival of the vehicles. We finally develop an AP placement algorithm based on theoretical results derived from the model to deploy the minimal number of roadside APs with quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. The simulation results have demonstrated the accuracy of the proposed analytical model and the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.