Enhancing Cellular Performance via Vehicular-based Opportunistic Relaying and Load Balancing

摘要

The automotive industry is undergoing disruptive changes, e.g., ride sharing and self-driving cars which, in addition to leveraging wireless connectivity, may lead to dramatic changes in the volume of infotainment and work related data consumption of vehicle bound passengers. This paper studies the potential gains of leveraging clusters of V2V interconnected vehicles to enable: (1) improved opportunistic access to the cellular infrastructure; and (2), balancing traffic loads across cells through cluster multihoming. A stochastic geometric model and associated analysis are used to obtain a preliminary understanding of possible gains of cluster-based opportunistic relaying and its sensitivity to the system parameters, e.g., base station density, vehicular cluster size and density etc. An optimal network utility maximization formulation is then developed to serve as a baseline to evaluate a simple distributed cluster management algorithm which for the scenarios considered proves to be near-optimal. Overall the results suggest that 3-10x throughput gains are possible along with significant improvements in user rate fairness depending on the system parameters.