A geometry-based coverage strategy over urban VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks have emerged as a promising field in wireless networking research. Unlike traditional wireless sensor networks, vehicular networks demand more consideration due to their assorted road topology, the high mobility of vehicles and the irregularly placed feasible region of deployment. As one of the most complex issues in vehicular networks, coverage strategy has been researched extensively, especially in complex urban scenarios. However, most existing coverage approaches are based on an ideal traffic map consisting of straight lines and nodes. These simplifications misrepresent the road networks. In order to provide more realistic vehicular networks deployment, this paper proposes a geometry-based coverage strategy to handle the deployment problem over urban scenarios. By taking the shape and area of road segments into account, our scheme suits different kinds of road topology and effectively solves the maximum coverage problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of our scheme, we compare this coverage strategy with α-coverage algorithm. The simulation result verifies that geometry-based coverage strategy culminates in a higher coverage ratio and a lower drop rate than α-coverage under the same constraints. The results also show that the deployment of Road Side Units (RSUs) in regions with high traffic flow is able to cover the majority of communication, so that less RSUs are able to provide better communication performance.