Utility optimization based RV selection for VCN

Vehicular communication network (VCN) with vehicles being mobile nodes in the last decade has received considerable attention both academia and industry. In VCN, vehicles are expected to be capable of communicating with other vehicles as well as stationary infrastructures, such as access points (APs). However, due to the limited coverage of APs, the fading characteristics of physical channel and the mobility of vehicles, the direct connection between a source vehicle (SV) and APs might be inaccessible. In this case, relay vehicles (RVs) can be applied for supporting multi-hop connection between SV and AP. In the practical application scenario that multiple candidate RVs are available, the problem of selecting the optimal RV has to be considered. This paper proposes a utility-based RV selection algorithm, which jointly considers multiple metrics from various protocol layers, including the characteristics of physical channel, the link status, the bandwidth and delay characteristics of RVs and user service requirement. The utility functions of both SVs and RVs are modeled and the utility maximization problem is solved based on ideal point method. Simulation results demonstrate that compared to previous algorithms, the proposed algorithm offers better performance in terms of user throughput, successful transmission rate, and the average transmission delay.