Ninth ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed Computing

Design of a network coverage analyzer for roadside-to-vehicle telematics

networks

Junghoon Lee
Dept. of Computer Science and Statistics
Cheju National University
Jeju-Do, Rep. of Korea
jhlee@cheju.ac.kr

Abstract notification[13]. As for network connectivity, the telemat-

ics system continuously integrates the ever-growing wire-
This paper designs a connectivity analysis scheme for less communication technology, while there are many com-
the roadside-to-vehicle telematics network based on the munication types within this system as shown in Figure 1,
real movement history of vehicle objects collected from taxi for example, V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure), V2V (vehicle-
telematics system currently in operation, aiming at provid- to-vehicle), and R2V (roadside-to-vehicle).
ing a useful guideline and information to build a telematics
network. The implemented analyzer can locate the current
and previous positions of all vehicles, decide whether it can
be connected to an RSU, and calculate the duration of dis-
connected state, taking into account the transmission range,
the number of RSUs, and RSU deployment. The RSU place-
ment scheme can improve the network coverage exploiting
the analysis result. The experiment result shows that each
time the transmission range increases by 100 m, with an ap-
propriate overlap ratio setting, the network coverage is im-
proved by about 10 % and that the larger the transmission
distance, the earlier the coverage meets the local maximum
according to the overlap ratio.

keywords: Vehicular telematics, roadside-to-vehicle net-

work, network coverage, taxi telematics system, RSU
placement
1 Introduction
1
Telematics, the blending of information and wireless
telecommunication technology, is now becoming able to
convey various information over vast networks, provid-
ing both civilian and government-related public services[1].
Because telematics devices inherently move around, their
services are typically LBSs (Location-Based Services) such
as car navigation, vehicle tracking, and automatic collision
1 This research was supported by the MIC (Ministry of Information and
Communication), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Re-
search Center) support program supervised by the IITA (Institute of In-
formation Technology Advancement) (IITA-2008-C1090-0801-0040).
Figure 1. Telematics networks
The infrastructure network is typically built upon a wired
backbone such as the cellular network, particularly CDMA
(Code Division Multiple Access) framework in Republic of
Korea. In this network, every telematics device is connected
directly to the central server via the specific telecommuni-
cation carrier[8]. Second, V2V network forms a VANET
(Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork) based on IEEE 802.11 proto-
col including DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communica-
tion), supporting inter-vehicle communication such as sup-
port collision avoidance, road hazard notification, and pas-
senger telecommunication[2]. In addition, another type of
communication, namely, R2V, enables each vehicle to ac-
cess the RSU (RoadSide Unit) installed in the fixed location
on a road[14]. RSU can be 802.11 access point, which typ-
ically plays a role of router. Through this buffer point, all

978-0-7695-3263-9/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE 201

DOI 10.1109/SNPD.2008.27
data on the RSU can be uploaded and downloaded, includ-
ing location-dependent advertisement, real-time traffic, and
vicinity digital map downloading.
However, the deployment cost and maintenance cost are
very high and it is difficult to decide where to place RSUs.
The successful deployment of R2V network depends on
network coverage, that is, the number and the ratio of telem-
atics devices that can be connected not only on a specific in-
stant but also on average. This coverage factor can be gen-
erally affected by the transmission range of wireless carrier
interface and the number of installable RSUs. In the mean
while, the location history data obtained from the telemat-
ics service system currently in operation can give us infor-
mation useful and valuable in making a decision on such
network configuration. In this regard, this paper is to ana-
lyze the effect of those factors using the real movement data
from an existing telematics service system. The analysis re-
sult will help to place RSUs and evaluate the coverage of a
given network configuration.
This paper is organized as follows: After issuing the
problem in Section 1, Section 2 provides some background
and related work. Then, Section 3 proposes a roadside-to-
vehicle telematics network architecture, describes a connec-
tivity analysis method as well as an RSU placement scheme.
After demonstrating the analysis results in Section 4, Sec-
tion 5 summarizes and concludes this paper with a brief de-
scription on future work.
2 Related work
Jeju Island is a famous vacation spot for not just Koreans
but also many international visitors, having many tourist at-
tractions as well as a well-maintained road network[7]. The
province is nominated as the Telematics model city, launch-
ing lots of industrial and academic projects, so telematics
devices are now popularized for both rent-a-cars and taxis
in this area. Particularly, the in-vehicle telematics device
is essentially equipped with a GPS receiver as well as a
CDMA cellular network interface. After all, Jeju area pos-
sesses a telematics network consist of a lot of active telemat-
ics devices, enabling us to design, develop, and test diverse
challenging services. For example, taxi telematics system
collects the location of each taxi to support real-time track-
ing and an efficient taxi dispatch. Currently, the number of
traced taxis is about 500, each of which reports its location
every minute. The more taxis will enroll to our system. A
great deal of location or movement data are being accumu-
lated day by day, and network planning systems can benefit
from those data. Many researches have been performed by
means of some mobility model. Saha et al. have pointed
out that simulation is an effective tool for the evaluation
of protocols and architecture in vehicular ad-hoc networks,
but it is important to use a realistic mobility model so that
202
the evaluation results are correctly compatible with the real-
world performance[12].
As for a study on the R2V communication, Zhang et al.
have proposed a data access scheduling scheme[14]. When
a vehicle enters the roadside unit area, it first listens to the
wireless channel, and all of them can send request to the unit
with its deadline when they want to access the network[9].
To cope with access from multiple vehicles, the message
is scheduled by its deadline and data size. Additionally,
this scheme exploits a single broadcast to serve multiple re-
quests and the authors also identified the effect of the upload
request on data quality. However, this scheme simply con-
siders the service ratio, so it may suffer from a problem that
a node with good link condition keeps being served, while
some nodes have little chance to transmit its message.
The Drive-thru Internet investigates the usability of IEEE
802.11 technology for providing network access to mobile
users in moving vehicles[11]. This work has measured
transmission characteristics for sending and receiving high
data volumes using UDP and TCP in vehicles that pass one
or more IEEE 802.11 access points at the roadside, aiming
at testing the feasibility of WLAN for fast moving object
and designing an efficient higher-layer protocols and appli-
cations. This work did not also handle the placement prob-
lem.
3 Connectivity analysis
3.1 System model
Figure 2 illustrates concept of our work. The vehicular
sensor network makes each sensor-enabled car collect sen-
sor data and generate message that should be delivered to
the some processing module[6]. In this case, the amount of
data can be large and the network connectivity gets more
important. If a vehicle can make a connection to any RSU,
it can send its data, so our goal is to maximize the possibil-
ity that a vehicle can access the RSU for the given number
of RSUs. The connectivity depends on many factors such
as transmission range, the number of RSUs, the movement
pattern of each vehicle, and so on. Intuitively, the larger the
transmission range, the higher the connectivity we can ex-
pect. In addition, the more the RSU, the more vehicles can
be reachable form the central server. The mobility pattern is
very similar for each day, so if a scheme works well on the
previous data, it will also work well in the future. Hence,
the history log can be so much helpful.
From the history log, each location is marked as a dark
rectangle at the corresponding point on the city map in Fig-
ure 2. Hot spots such as airport, city hall, and market place
indispensably have many points. Each RSU, marked as an
antenna, has surrounding circle, of which radius is as large
as the transmission range. If a vehicle is located inside a
circle, it can access the data or even Internet via the RSU.
Otherwise, namely, when it cannot be included in any cir-
cle, the vehicle is disconnected from the network system,
and it should keep messages generated during the interval
in its local cache or discard. Due to hot spots, even with
the small number of RSUs, we can achieve reasonable con-
nectivity. In case the amount of messages generated at the
sensor-enabled cars gets larger, for example, when the car is
equipped with a video capturer, the number of vehicles an
RSU can connect is limited[3]. However, in this paper, we
will not consider this situation to concentrate on the con-
nectivity analysis.
Figure 2. System overview
3.2 Placement scheme
To design an RSU placement scheme, we implement
an analyzer capable of measuring network connectivity for
the roadside-to-vehicle telematics network, its graphic in-
terface being shown in Figure 2. The analyzer can plot the
movement history of all vehicles, decide whether it can be
connected to an RSU, and calculate the duration of discon-
nected state. In addition, the analyzer takes the transmission
range and RSU density as the input parameter.
As shown in Figure 2, the simulator plots all of the lo-
cation trajectory for the given time interval, for example, 3
days, on the map of the given area in which we are plan-
ning to place RSUs. Each vehicle reports its location ev-
ery minute, and every location is marked with a point re-
gardless of its time stamp value. The problem to solve is,
for the given number of RSUs, to place the circles so that
the number of points included in the circles is maximized.
Even if we decide the location of RSU, it may be impossi-
ble to install at the very spot. However, in most cases, it can
be located just a little bit away from the original installa-
tion point, with a small discrepancy of coverage estimation,
making it possible to assume that the RSUs can be put at
any place we want.
203
d d
l
Figure 3. Overlap ratio
The placement scheme begins with the initial candidate
setting. At the initial stage, the candidate location is set by
grid style topology, the distance between two candidates is
chosen by the overlap ratio. In Figure 3, radius, d, is equal
to the transmission range and l is the length of the over-
lapped area of the two adjacent circles. l can be 2d when
two circles completely coincide, while 0 when they share
just one point on their border. We set 1.0 − 2d l
as the over-
lap ratio. If this value is 0.5, l is equal to d. When overlap
ratio is 1.0, two circles have no overlapped area. Now, every
circle counts the number of points belonging to it with the
support of analyzer and is ordered by this frequency value.
Finally, for the given number of RSUs, say n, top n of cir-
cle centers are selected for RSU installation points. Figure 2
also shows the placement result for the case of 200 m trans-
mission range, and 50 RSUs. At first, about 200 candidates
are selected, and only 50 were left.
If the simulation procedure combines a time sequence,
each vehicle can have two states, namely connected and dis-
connected states. As each vehicle keeps messages in its lo-
cal buffer when disconnected and sends to the server after
being connected, it is important to measure the characteris-
tics of time interval during which a vehicle is disconnected.
This is due to the fact that a stored message still has the
possibility to meet its timeliness requirement[4]. It is also
possible to measure the distance a vehicle has moved while
disconnected.
4 Performance evaluation
This section measures the performance of the proposed
scheme in terms of network coverage and disconnection
time. The network coverage means the probability that a
vehicle can make a connection to some RSU. The discon-
nection time measures the average time interval a vehicle is
out of the range of all RSUs. This measurement will help to
decide the amount of buffer space in the in-vehicle telemat-
ics device. In addition, we chose the transmission range, the
number of RSUs, and the overlap ratio for the performance
parameters. Transmission range is the distance reachable
from an RSU. It depends on the wireless interface technol-
ogy, currently known to be from 50 m to 300 m, and up-
coming wireless technology will continuously extend this
range. Even for the same wireless interfaces, their actual
transmission distances can be different in different areas, for 0.9
"100"
example, plain outfield area, downtown area having many 0.85 "200"
"300"
tall buildings, and so on. So, we consider it as the average 0.8

transmission distance. The overlap ratio takes into account 0.75

Coverage (%)
0.7
the distance between two adjacent RSUs in the initial set-
0.65
ting as shown in Figure 3. Small overlap ratio can generate
0.6
a multiply covered area, while large one can bring the blind
0.55
area, which is covered by no RSU.
0.5
Figure 4 plots the network coverage according to the
0.45
number of RSUs placed by the proposed scheme, for the
0.4
transmission ranges of 100 m, 200 m, and 300 m, respec- 0.5 0.55 0.6 0.65 0.7 0.75 0.8 0.85 0.9 0.95 1
Overlap ratio
tively. In this experiment, overlap ratio is set to 0.95. The
curve of 300 m reaches the saturation point when the num-
ber of RSUs is about 60, but the other schemes still im- Figure 5. Coverage vs. overlap ratio
proves the coverage beyond this point. The number of initial
candidates is minimal when the overlap ratio is 1.0 with the keeping 5 minutes data is generally enough. In addition, ac-
maximum transmission range. This number can be the up- cording to the driving pattern of a vehicle, the buffer space
per bound for the number of installable RSUs in our experi- can be adjusted. Finally, Figure 7 shows the effect of over-
ments. Accordingly, we change the number of RSUs only to lap ratio to the average disconnection time. Like the case
130, because the number of RSUs for the given range is 133 of Figure 5, The larger the transmission distance, the earlier
for the case of 300 m transmission range and 1.0 overlap ra- the placement meets the local maximum, as it can minimize
tio. The experiment focuses on measuring the coverage un- the blind area with the appropriate number of RSUs.
der the same number of RSUs. Figure 5 shows the effect of
overlap ratio also for the 3 transmission ranges, the number 45
"100"
of RSUs fixed to 80. The larger the transmission distance, 40 "200"
"300"
the earlier the placement meets the local maximum, as it 35
Disconnection time (min)

can minimize the blind area with the appropriate number of

30
RSUs. Each time the transmission range increases by 100
25
m, with an appropriate overlap ratio setting, the network
20
coverage is improved by about 10 %.
15

10
0.7
"100"
"200" 5
0.6 "300"
0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140
0.5
The number of gates
Coverage (%)

0.4

0.3 Figure 6. Disconnection time vs. the number

of gates
0.2

0.1

0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140
The number of gates
5 Conclusion

Figure 4. Coverage vs. the number of gates
The graphs of Figure 6 and Figure 7 show the simula-
tion results for the disconnection time analysis. Figure 6
plots the average time interval a node is disconnected from
the network according to the number of placed RSUs. In
this experiment, the overlap ratio is set to 0.95. The result
shows the the average duration drops under 5 minutes when
we have more than 47 RSUs for 200 m and 300 m trans-
mission range, indicating that the buffer amount capable of
This paper has designed a connectivity analysis scheme
for the roadside-to-vehicle telematics network based on the
real movement history of vehicle objects collected from
taxi telematics system currently in operation. The proposed
scheme can provide a useful guideline and information to
telematics network planning. The implemented analyzer
can locate the current and previous positions of all vehicles,
decide whether it can be connected to an RSU, and calcu-
late the duration of disconnected state, taking into account
the transmission range, the number of RSUs, and RSU de-

204
 0.9
"100"
[7] J. Lee, E. Kang, and G. Park. Design and implementation of
0.85 "200" a tour planning system for telematics users. Lecture Note on
"300"
0.8 Computer Science, 4707:179–189, August 2007.
Disconnection time (min)

0.75 [8] J. Lee, G. Park, H. Kim, Y. Yang, P. Kim, and S. Kim. A

0.7 telematics service system based on the linux cluster. Lecture
0.65 Note on Computer Science, 3340:660–667, May 2007.
0.6 [9] T. Mak, L. K, and R. Sengupta. A multi-channel vanet pro-
0.55 viding concurrent safety and commercial services. ACM
0.5
VANET, pages 1–9, 2006.
0.45
[10] V. Namboodiri, M. Agrawal, and L. Gao. A study on the fea-
sibility of mobile gateways for vehicular ad-hoc networks.
0.4
0.5 0.55 0.6 0.65 0.7 0.75 0.8 0.85 0.9 0.95 1 ACM VANET, pages 66–75, 2004.
Overlap ratio [11] J. Ott and D. Kutscher. Drive-thru internet: Ieee 802.11b for
automobile users. IEEE Infocom, 2004.
Figure 7. Disconnection time vs. the overlap [12] A. Saha and D. Johnson. Modeling mobility model for ve-
hicular ad hoc networks. ACM VANET, pages 91–92, 2004.
ratio
[13] H. Wu, R. Guensler, and R. Hunter. Mddv: A mobility-
centric data dissemination algorithm for vehicular networks.
ACM VANET, pages 47–56, 2004.
ployment. The RSU placement scheme, with the help of [14] Y. Zhang, J. Zhao, and G. Cao. On scheduling vehicle-
roadside data access. ACM VANET, pages 9–18, 2007.
the analyzer, has improved the network coverage. The ex-
periment result has revealed that each time the transmission
range increases by 100 m, with an appropriate overlap ratio
setting, the network coverage is improved by about 10 %
and that the larger the transmission distance, the earlier the
coverage meets the local maximum according to the overlap
ratio.
After all, the location data obtained from the taxi telem-
atics system can give us diverse information valuable in
making a decision on the network configuration including
the number of RSUs, RSU placement, and the amount of
local buffer. At now, we are planning to combine the loca-
tion data to the legacy simulator such as ns-2[5]. In addi-
tion, we are modifying our simulator to extend to the case to
mobile gateway[10]. Finally, the initial distribution is very
important to the coverage of RSU placement, so we are now
developing a new placement strategy which starts from the
densest area in the initial placement.

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