An Analytic Hierarchy Process Based Approach for Optimal Road Side Unit Placement in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Road-Side Units (RSUs) act as a backbone for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). The location and density of RSUs largely affect the performance of VANETs. Although, large number of RSUs guarantee better coverage and performance, it results in high capital and operational expenditure. Hence, optimal placement of RSUs is considered as an important problem in VANETs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to solve the optimal RSU placement problem using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Our evaluations show that AHP requires lesser number of RSU deployment which eventually leads to lower overall cost. We also analyze coverage achieved by defining expected RSU-to-RSU delay as a performance metric. We find that our AHP based solution consistently outperforms in terms of delay compared to uniform and hot spot placement strategies for various vehicle densities. Obtained results are verified using extensive simulation.