User/Operator Utility-Based Infrastructure Deployment Strategies for Vehicular Networks

In this paper, we propose a framework for user/operator utility-based infrastructure deployment in vehicular networks. We extend the well known maximum coverage problem to consider the following four complementary aspects: (i) a non-circular polygon-based coverage representing measured heterogeneous any-directional communication conditions (ii) a generic intensity-based utility function reflecting variations of the intensity of a desired metric over the polygonal area (iii) comparable metrics either by normalizing the utility over the coverage, or by an intensity threshold maintaining a minimal utility regardless of coverage, (iv) a joint user/operator utility optimization minimizing the infrastructure deployment. We finally illustrate the benefits of our framework over related coverage-based approaches in an exemplary study.