Vehicle-Assisted Offloading on Metropolitan Streets: Enhancing Geographical Fluidity of Wireless Resources

According to field measurement data, we show that the traffic load of cellular networks is highly nonuniform along metropolitan streets. To overcome this predicament, we propose a vehicle-assisted offloading (VAO) scheme, which exploits the vehicle queue stopping for the red light to offload data traffic from busy street intersection cells to their adjacent cells that are largely idle. The performance of VAO is theoretically analyzed by considering both the road traffic conditions and the communications between vehicles and pedestrians. Simulations with practical configurations have verified our analysis and demonstrated that the VAO is capable of achieving substantial performance gain.