Effort: A New Metric for Roadside Unit Placement in 5G Enabled Vehicular Networks

Roadside Units (RSUs) play a vital role in 5G-enabled vehicular networks as a platform for deploying various system components such as sensing devices, access points, SDN nodes, edge/fog servers, and even light-weight cloud terminals. Therefore, it is important to place RSUs at appropriate locations such that vehicles can make frequent contacts with them and, thereby, achieving the required QoS performance. In this paper, we define a new metric Effort for placing RSUs in vehicular networks for improving the number of vehicle-RSU contacts by considering road network characteristics such as road-length, road-type, and importance of the junctions. We derive an Effort-graph from the road network to compute the RSU locations using betweenness centrality measure. The simulation results show that our scheme provides better vehicle-RSU contacts in real-world traffic scenarios without compromising vehicle-RSU contact time and per-trip contact probability.