GICA: An evolutionary strategy for roadside units deployment in vehicular networks

In vehicular networks, deploying a vehicular infrastructure named roadside units (RSU) is a key solution to improve performance of message dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Specifically, RSUs placement is described as the process of finding the best combination of RSUs on the adequate intersections in order to improve VANET performance in terms of network connectivity. In this paper, we address the problem of deploying a minimum set of RSUs that is able to maximize network coverage. Therefore, we formulate this problem as a multi-objective optimization problem, hence we propose a new genetic intersection-coverage algorithm (GICA) based on the priority concept. GICA suggests putting RSUs within the more popular intersection aiming to maximize the connectivity between RSUs while minimizing the interference rate and RSUs costs. After a set of simulations and comparisons against the conventional greedy approach, the obtained results demonstrated that GICA ensures the largest network connectivity with a minimum number of RSUs placed in the tested area with a reduced overlapping ratio.