Throughput of Infrastructure-based Cooperative Vehicular Networks

In this paper, we provide detailed analysis of the achievable throughput of infrastructure-based vehicular network with a finite traffic density under a cooperative communication strategy, which explores combined use of vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, mobility of vehicles and cooperations among vehicles and infrastructure to facilitate the data transmission. A closed form expression of the achievable throughput is obtained, which reveals the relationship between the achievable throughput and its major performance-impacting parameters such as distance between adjacent infrastructure points, radio ranges of infrastructure and vehicles, transmission rates of V2I and V2V communications and vehicular density. Numerical and simulation results show that the proposed cooperative communication strategy significantly increases the throughput of vehicular networks, compared with its non-cooperative counterpart, even when the traffic density is low. Our results shed insight on the optimum deployment of vehicular network infrastructure and optimum design of cooperative communication strategies in vehicular networks to maximize the throughput.