Coverage and Throughput Trade-off in Relay Assisted V2I Communication in Microcellular Urban Networks

Abstract

Vehicular communications are often used to extend the coverage range in urban networks. The millimeter-wave (mm-wave) band offers low end-to-end latency and higher data throughput, but the wireless network coverage degrades faster at higher carrier frequencies. In our proposed scenario, idle vehicles act as relays to boost the signal to users with poor coverage. In previous work, we have quantified the coverage gain with relay-assisted communication by comparing the quality of the direct link between a micro-cell and a vehicular user with the relay-assisted link. However, the amount of resources is limited and the number of resource blocks (RBs) assigned to each user decreases with higher user densities. In this paper, we derive the distribution of the number of users per cell depending on the user and base station (BS) densities and we show the number of users to schedule per cell according to a minimum quality threshold. We then consider a resource fair scheduler and we compare the throughput of the direct link with the combined link over several user densities.