Modeling and Design of Millimeter-Wave Networks for Highway Vehicular Communication

Connected and autonomous vehicles will play a pivotal role in future intelligent transportation systems and smart cities, in general. High-speed and low-latency wireless communication links will allow municipalities to warn vehicles against safety hazards, as well as support cloud-driving solutions to drastically reduce traffic jams and air pollution. To achieve these goals, vehicles need to be equipped with a wide range of sensors generating and exchanging high rate data streams. Recently, millimeter wave (mm Wave) techniques have been introduced as a means of fulfilling such high data rate requirements. In this paper, we model a highway communication network and characterize its fundamental link budget metrics. In particular, we specifically consider a network where vehicles are served by mm Wave base stations (BSs) deployed alongside the road. To evaluate our highway network, we develop a new theoretical model that accounts for a typical scenario where heavy vehicles (such as buses and lorries) in slow lanes obstruct line-of-sight (LOS) paths of vehicles in fast lanes and, hence, act as blockages. Using tools from stochastic geometry, we derive approximations for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise Ratio (SINR) outage probability, as well as the probability that a user achieves a target communication rate (rate coverage probability). Our analysis provides new design insights for mmWave highway communication networks. In considered highway scenarios, we show that reducing the horizontal beam width from 90 degrees to 30 degrees determines a minimal reduction in the SINR outage probability (namely 4. 10(-2) at maximum). Also, unlike bidimensional mmWave cellular networks, for small BS densities (namely one BS every 500 m) it is still possible to achieve an SINR outage probability smaller than 0.2.