2CON-DEPLOY: A Fixed Infrastructure Deployment Strategy to Enable DTN in Vehicular Networks

Efficient allocation of vehicular communication infrastructure is crucial for maximizing coverage with minimal investment in urban networks. Current approaches to vehicular network deployment often overlook the efficiency of coverage relative to the size of the infrastructure installed, resulting in solutions that can be either overly expensive or ineffective in dynamic urban environments. This paper introduces the 2CON deployment strategy, which aims to minimize V2I communication infrastructure enabled through DTN architecture to ensure that the largest possible proportion of vehicles circulating in an urban area make at least two contacts with the infrastructure within a predefined time interval. The proposed approach utilizes a GRASP heuristic to address this NP-complete problem, applying it to a realistic vehicular mobility scenario in Cologne, Germany. The 2CON strategy significantly outperforms the baseline method of deploying RSUs in high-traffic areas by increasing vehicle coverage with less infrastructure. It achieves coverage enhancements of up to 873.2% while utilizing just 0.67% of the urban roadway area.