Optimizing Roadside Advertisement Dissemination in Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems

In this paper, we address a promising application in the Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems (VCPS) called roadside advertisement dissemination. Its application involves three elements: the drivers in the vehicles, Roadside Access Points (RAPs), and shopkeepers. The shopkeeper wants to attract as many customers as possible, through using RAPs to disseminate advertisements to the passing vehicles. Upon receiving an advertisement, the driver may detour towards the shop, depending on the detour distance. Given a fixed number of RAPs and the traffic distribution, our goal is to optimize the RAP placement for the shopkeeper to maximally attract potential customers. This application is a non-trivial extension of traditional coverage problems, the difference being that we use RAPs to cover the traffic flows. RAP placement algorithms may pose complex trade-offs. If we place RAPs at locations that can provide small detour distances to attract more customers, these locations may not necessarily be located in heavy traffic regions. While heavy traffic regions cover more flows, they can cause large detour distances, making shopping less attractive to customers. To balance this trade off, novel RAP placement algorithms are proposed. Since real-world traffic distributions exhibit unique patterns, here we further consider the Manhattan grid scenario and then propose corresponding near-optimal solutions. Real trace-driven experiments validate the competitive performance of the proposed algorithms.