A new strategy for the selection of communication technologies in VANETs with fully controllable vehicles

Vehicular communications are laying the foundations for new research areas. Embedded systems within vehicles allow the management of information in movement situations. This article focuses on the choice of the communication technology used by the vehicles with controllable trajectories. The objective is to maximize the throughput, in the centralized way, provided by these vehicles. The study area is a map divided into zones. The choice of communication technologies depends on the crossing zone of the map. In the studied scenario, the vehicle paths and their communication technologies are defined according to this environment. The number of communication technologies usable in the same zone, c, may be restricted. The problem is first formulated as an optimization problem. The complexity of this problem is then proven as NP - hard and there is no possibility of constant factor approximation algorithm generally. Assuming c ≥ k, with k the number of controllable vehicles, the problem remains NP -hard, but a new polynomial time α-approximation algorithm is analyzed. The variable α is equal to (1 - 1/e)with e being the base of the natural logarithm. This ratio is the best possible, unless NP ⊆ DTIME(n
^loglog(n)
).