Enabling Road Side Units with Optical Access Networks: Planning and Techno-Economic Analysis

The upcoming Connected and cooperative and automated mobility paradigm (CCAM) requires the deployment of road-side units (RSUs) beside the roads to provide wireless communication to connected-vehicle on board units. The deployment of RSUs along the highways provide low-latency communication, suitable for applications where high-speed response is needed, such as autonomous driving and crash avoidance. These RSUs must be connected to the Internet through a high-bandwidth and reliable access network being the optical fiber technologies the most convenient technology for that. In this paper, we propose a planning scheme for enabling RSUs with optical access networks. The method starts choosing the locations of the access network headers (the connection points to the local service provider facilities), and then defines the connections between the headers and the RSUs in a convenient manner considering the road infrastructure. Then, two deployment technologies based on optical fibers are compared: Point to Point (P2P) and Passive Optical Network (PON). A techno-economic analysis was performed, and results show that P2P and PON approaches are very similar in terms of cost, therefore, due to technical advantages, P2P is recommended as deployment strategy for the described scenario.