The Energy Efficiency Potential of Moving and Fixed Relays for Vehicular Users

In future wireless networks a significant number of wireless broadband users will be vehicular, i.e., they will be in public transportation vehicles like buses, trams or trains. In this paper, we show that the efficient use of relay nodes to serve vehicular users can greatly improve the energy efficiency of the network while maintaining the required quality-of-service (QoS). We consider vehicular users moving along a road within the coverage of a base station (BS). Communication can take place in a single-hop fashion (baseline case) or can be assisted by a single relay node (dual-hop), which can either be a fixed relay node (FRN) deployed at a specific position on the road or a moving relay node (MRN) mounted on top of the vehicle. We compare the required overall transmit energy for direct transmission, FRN and MRN assisted transmission in a noise limited system under Rayleigh fading while assuming an outage probability (OP) target. A lower bound is derived for the required energy of the FRN assisted transmission. It is shown that as the vehicular penetration loss (VPL) increases, both FRN and MRN assisted transmission can significantly lower the overall transmit energy compared to the conventional one-hop case. Moreover, transmission relying on an MRN outperforms the FRN assisted case when VPL is moderate to high.