On the Impact of Road Traffic Control on Mobile Communications

Abstract

Road traffic control systems can change vehicles’ speeds, density, and distribution in spatial and temporal dimensions, which may have significant impacts on the performance of pre-established cellular networks and Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Identifying these impacts is crucial for satisfying service requirements, especially for the future of connected autonomous vehicles. Despite the extensive research that studied the impact of mobility on communication, the impact of traffic control on communication has not been addressed. Therefore, in this paper, we attempt to understand how traffic control strategies can affect communication network performance. We focus on vehicle navigation techniques because of their global network impacts that can significantly affect the load and handover rate on base stations. In this paper, we compare the Dynamic Shortest Path Routing (DSPR) to the state-of-the-art vehicle routing techniques, namely, the K-Shortest Path Routing (K-SPR) and Travel Time System Optimum Navigation (TTSON). We build a real network with calibrated traffic and use a microscopic traffic simulator as a testbed to measure the load and handover rates on base stations. Moreover, we developed and validated an analytical model to compute the packet drop probability based on the base station normalized load in the Fifth Generation New Radio (5G-NR) cellular networks. The developed model is integrated into the testbed to evaluate the reliability of the three traffic control systems. The analysis shows that road traffic load-balancing achieved by both TTSON and K-SPR improves communication performance in the simulated network.