Energy-Efficient Strategy for Improving Coverage and Rate Using Hybrid Vehicular Networks

A decade back, emergency voice communication was the only target to support the patient in an ambulance. It is now evolved from emergency voice communication to vital signal monitoring and operating the machines from the remote place. This evolution requires support from technology to meet the high data rates along with reliability for the specified applications. The millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication support high data rate requirements of vehicular communication. However, in the case of mmWave, the radio signals vary fast. It poses the implementation challenge to the mmWave system in this scenario. The other implementations challenges of mmWave are high path loss, severe blockage and frequent beam updates which inhibit seamless connectivity (reliability) to vehicular nodes. However, the reliability is always a prime concern for any vehicular communication system. This paper addresses these challenges by implementing a novel energy-efficient strategy based on RSUs deployment and radio access technology (RAT). The strategy is to deploy RSUs on either side of the road and use an optimal combination of mmWave and microwave RAT. The essential analysis of such a hybrid system involves the evaluation of parameters based on the analytic model. Hence, this paper analytically obtains the expression for seamless coverage and connectivity. The analysis is also extended to rate and energy efficiency calculations. The analysis is supported by probabilistic models-based simulations that agree closely with computation results. The results claim that the proposed model leads to improved performance in terms of coverage and rate while maintaining the cost and energy efficiency within the limits.