Augmenting Vehicle-to-Roadside Connectivity in Multi Channel Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicle-to-Roadside (V2R) wireless communication is a cornerstone for providing a wide plethora of intelligent transportation system (ITS) applications in the near future. Initial investment costs could discourage the deployment of a ubiquitous roadside infrastructure to support on-the-road networks; this would imply discontinuous coverage and short-lived connectivity. The purpose of this paper is to design techniques that make the best of sparse road-side unit (RSU) placement by supporting the spreading of network initialization advertisements from RSUs, when considering the multichannel features of the recently published IEEE 802.11p/IEEE 1609.4 standards for wireless access in vehicular environment (WAVE). The proposed techniques leverage time, space and channel diversity to improve efficiency and robustness of the network advertisement procedure in a urban scenario where obstructions to signal propagation due to buildings and traffic jam could hinder successful message spreading. Simulation under different RSU density, vehicular networking technology penetration rate, data rate, and packet size, aims at assessing effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solutions.