Enabling Cooperative Relaying VANET Clouds Over LTE-A Networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the area of heterogeneous wireless relaying vehicular clouds. We devise an advanced vehicular relaying technique for enhanced connectivity in densely populated urban areas. We investigate the performance of a transmission scheme over a Long-Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) network where vehicles act as relaying cooperating terminals for a downlink session between a base station and an end-user. The abundance of moving vehicles, operating in an ad hoc fashion, can eliminate the need for establishing a dedicated relaying infrastructure. However, the associated wireless links in vehicular clouds are characterized by a doubly selective fading channel; this causes performance degradation in terms of increased error probability. Hence, we propose a precoded cooperative transmission technique to extract the underlying rich multipath–Doppler-spatial diversity, which is a relay selection scheme to take advantage of the potentially large number of available relaying vehicles. We further contribute by the derivation of a closed-form error rate expression, diversity gain, and outage expressions and introduce our derived performance unconditional expressions as a benchmark to assess our analysis and future research studies of such an approach. Our analytical and simulation results indicate that significant diversity gains and reduced error rates are achievable. In addition, there is a noticeable reduction in the required transmitting power compared with traditional transmission schemes, as well as an increase in distance coverage.