IEEE 802.11p for cellular offloading in vehicular sensor networks

The use of vehicles as sensors is a new paradigm to enable an efficient environment monitoring and an improved traffic management. In most cases, the sensed information must be collected at a remote control center and one of the most challenging aspects is the uplink acquisition of data from vehicles, which is presently performed through cellular networks. With the objective to offload cellular networks, in this paper we propose and discuss the adoption of the WAVE/IEEE 802.11p protocols, which represent the state of the art for short range vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications. More specifically, we discuss the system design and assess the cellular resource saving that can be obtained in urban scenarios through the deployment of WAVE/IEEE 802.11p devices on the vehicles and roadside units, evaluating the impact of the percentage of equipped vehicles, of the number of deployed road side units, and of the adopted routing protocol. Results, obtained through an integrated simulation platform taking both realistic vehicular environments and wireless network communication aspects into account, show that the deployment of few road side units and the use of low complexity routing protocols leads to a significant reduction of cellular resource occupation, even approaching 100% with a high density of equipped vehicles.