Energy-Efficient Cooperative Techniques for Infrastructure-to-Vehicle Communications

In wireless distributed networks, cooperative relay and cooperative multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques can be used to exploit the spatial and temporal diversity gains to increase the performance or reduce the transmission energy consumption. The energy efficiency of cooperative MIMO and relay techniques is then very useful for the infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) and infrastructure-to-infrastructure (I2I) communications in intelligent transport system (ITS) networks, where the energy consumption of wireless nodes embedded on road infrastructure is constrained. In this paper, applications of cooperation between nodes to ITS networks are proposed, and the performance and the energy consumption of cooperative relay and cooperative MIMO are investigated and compared with the traditional multihop technique. The comparison between these cooperative techniques helps us choose the optimal cooperative strategy in terms of energy consumption for energy-constrained road infrastructure networks in ITS applications.