Roadside Unit Deployment for Coverage Improvement in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network

A vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is a developing communication connectivity technology for the future. Vehicular networks use roadside units (RSUs) to improve the communication capacities of the vehicles to transmit control messages and provide access to vehicles, drivers, and passengers through the Internet. Unfortunately, when using the IEEE802.11p standard, wireless signal propagation within vehicular networks is mainly affected by building barriers, trees, and urban structures. Besides, some safety-related applications require a fast and reliable warning message transmission to the traffic authorities and emergency services. However, multi-hop communication is not always feasible in vehicular environments because of the lack of connectivity. Therefore, an efficient, intelligent, and cost-effective RSU deployment technique within an urban environment is required to solve the problems related to signal propagation. This paper proposes an edge-based clustering method with a Voronoi diagram for roadside unit (RSU) deployment to improve vehicular ad-hoc network coverage. The proposed method reduces the number of RSUs to cover a geographic area and increases the RSUs logical coverage area to improve communication reliability.