Abstract. Information dissemination is an important application in VANETs for traffic safety and efficiency. In urban area, roadside infrastructure nodes can be deployed for information dissemination. However, it is inefficient and uneconomical to cover the whole urban area. How to find the optimal locations to place DPs is a research problem. Some works on this issue have to collect accurate trajectories of all the vehicles, which is not practical in the real environment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for DPs placement in grid road networks without knowing trajectories. Based on the analysis of path number between two intersections, a probabilistic model is proposed to get the trajectories estimation of vehicles. The theoretical optimal algorithm (OA) and two heuristic algorithms (called KP-G and GA) are developed for the problem. Simulation results reveal that GA is scalable and has the highest coverage ratio on average.
IntroductionInformation dissemination based on Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) is intended to the support traffic safety and efficiency, as well as services for drivers [1][2][3]. In this paper, we deal with information dissemination from roadside infrastructure to passing vehicles, tackling the specific issue of deploying an intelligent transport system infrastructure that efficiently achieves the dissemination goal. For example, transport department can disseminate some traffic news to vehicles. We refer to the vehicles who have received the disseminated information as informed vehicles. Our goal is to maximize the number of informed vehicles. In other words, we aim at maximizing the coverage ratio of information dissemination. In principle, an information dissemination system could leverage both vehicle-tovehicle (V2V) and vehicles-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. When only a few of roadside units (RSUs) are deployed, V2V communications could enable data sharing thus increasing the coverage ratio of information dissemination. However, the gain achieved through V2V communication strictly depends on the network topology