Vehicles Meet Infrastructure: Toward Capacity–Cost Tradeoffs for Vehicular Access Networks

Access infrastructure, such as Wi-Fi access points and cellular base stations (BSs), plays a vital role in providing pervasive Internet services to vehicles. However, the deployment costs of different access infrastructure are highly variable. In this paper, we make an effort to investigate the capacity-cost tradeoffs for vehicular access networks, in which access infrastructure is deployed to provide a downlink data pipe to all vehicles in the network. Three alternatives of wireless access infrastructure are considered, i.e., cellular BSs, wireless mesh backbones (WMBs), and roadside access points (RAPs). We first derive a lower bound of downlink capacity for each type of access infrastructure. We then present a case study based on a perfect city grid of 400 km² with 0.4 million vehicles, in which we examine the capacity-cost tradeoffs of different deployment solutions in terms of capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operational expenditures (OPEX). The rich implications from our results provide fundamental guidance on the choice of cost-effective access infrastructure for the emerging vehicular networking.