Energy Efficiency Analysis of a Roadside Relay Point Deployment for Information Delivery in VANET

This paper studies the energy efficiency problem with a roadside relay point (RP) deployment for road-condition information dissemination in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). In the RP deployment, a certain number of low-cost devices with simple relaying functionality are uniformly deployed between two neighbor RSUs on a highway, which can be used as a relay to help deliver road-condition information collected by a vehicle when needed. An analytical model is developed to analyze the impacts of the vehicle transmission radius and the vehicle arrival rate on the average number of RPs that need to be turned on for information dissemination and the average amount of RP energy that can be saved without affecting information dissemination. The effectiveness of the analytical model is verified through simulation results.