Delay Efficient Disconnected RSU Placement Algorithm for VANET Safety Applications

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have been envisioned to prominently enhance the road safety and traffic efficiency through real-time vehicle- to-vehicle and vehicle-to- infrastructure communications. Roadside Units (RSUs) play an important role in vehicular environments in terms of connectivity, routing, and transmission delay. However, deploying enough RSUs to provide a universal coverage within an area is not feasible. In addition, there still lacks understanding of the performance of message dissemination in urban environments where one deploys RSUs in a stand- alone fashion. In this paper, we study the performance of message dissemination in VANET environments and propose a Safety-Based Disconnected RSU Placement algorithm (S-BRP) that reduces the dissemination delay in some areas. We evaluate the S-BRP algorithm through extensive simulation studies. The proposed algorithm outperforms Mesh, the alternate deployment policy, in terms of the dissemination delay and traffic flow.