Optimal Placement of Gateways in Vehicular Networks

In vehicular networks, mobile users in vehicles can access the Internet and enjoy various kinds of services such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and online streaming video. To provide satisfactory quality of service (QoS), we need to appropriately place gateways to link mobile nodes to the Internet or any other information networks. In this paper, we address the problem of optimally placing gateways in vehicular networks to minimize the average number of hops from access points (APs) to gateways, so that the communication delay can be minimized. Moreover, we also investigate how to minimize the total power consumption, and we show that, when the average number of hops is minimized, the average capacity of each AP can be maximized.