On the Performance of Sparse Vehicular Networks with Road Side Units

The reliability of communication in vehicular networks depends mostly on the density of DSRC-enabled vehicles that form the network. In highway scenarios, and depending on the time of day, the probability of having a disconnected vehicular network can be very high, which hinders communication reliability. To improve communication in these scenarios, infrastructure points known as Road Side Units (RSU) may be used. RSUs, however, have an associated cost, and therefore the number of RSUs needs to be minimized while still providing a significant improvement on communications. In this paper we study the effect of including RSUs as relay nodes to improve communication in highway scenarios. We model the average time taken to propagate a packet to disconnected nodes (denoted as re-healing time) when considering both scenarios of connected and disconnected RSUs. We then compare the results of both these models and of a model with no RSUs. Results show significant improvements with RSU deployments, both connected and disconnected, particularly in multi-cluster communication scenarios.