Due to advances in wireless communication technologies, wireless transmissions gradually replace traditional wired data transmissions. In recent years, vehicles on the move can also enjoy the convenience of wireless communication technologies by assisting each other in message exchange and form an interconnecting network, namely Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). In a VANET, each vehicle is capable of communicating with nearby vehicles and accessing information provided by the network. There are two basic communication models in VANETs, V2V and V2I. Vehicles equipped with wireless transceiver can communicate with other vehicles (V2V) or roadside units (RSUs) (V2I). RSUs acting as gateways are entry points to the Internet for vehicles. Naturally, vehicles tend to choose nearby RSUs as serving gateways. However, due to uneven density distribution and high mobility nature of vehicles, load imbalance of RSUs can happen. In this paper, we study the RSU load-balancing problem and propose two solutions. In the first solution, the whole network is divided into sub-regions based on RSUs’ locations. A RSU provides Internet access for vehicles in its sub-region and the boundaries between sub-regions change dynamically to adopt to load migration. In the second solution, vehicles choose their serving RSUs distributedly by taking their future trajectories and RSUs’ loading information into considerations. From simulation results, the proposed methods can improve packet delivery ratio, packet delay, and load balance among RSUs.
Performance evaluation of safety applications over DSRC vehicular ad hoc networks