Greta: Towards a General Roadside Unit Deployment Framework

As an essential component, roadside units (RSUs) play an indispensable role in realizing Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) by seamlessly connecting various intelligent devices and vehicles. To facilitate the construction of V2X, much research has been done in designing effective RSU deployment strategies. However, most of these efforts are largely limited by design utility and deployment scalability. To address the limitations of previous works, this paper proposes a general RSU deployment framework, Greta, which can evaluate candidate deployment sites from different perspectives with rich input data, and satisfy different requirements on optimization metrics. To this end, we model the general RSU deployment problem as a customized reinforcement learning (RL) problem that intelligently explores the deployment environment to find a good deployment strategy. Specifically, we design an effective data profiling network to extract features from multi-modality input data. These extracted features are gradually weighted, fused, and encoded as part of the state representation of the RL model. We further design new reward functions considering various deployment metrics and propose an action space pruning scheme to speed up model training. We implement a prototype system of Greta and extensively evaluate its performance using real-world data. The results show Greta achieves remarkable performance gains compared to recent RSU deployment methods. © 2023 IEEE.