Throughput-Aware Joint Route-Access Network Selection in Vehicular Communications

Abstract

Deploying intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is a promising solution to on-road safety, transportation efficiency and high data rate services for traveling vehicles. In ITS, vehicular networks (VN) are expected to be deployed together with traditional cellular networks (CN) to enhance the network access quality. As even for the same network, the quality of network access varies from location to location, mobile data offloading (MDO), which dynamically selects access network for vehicles, should be jointly considered with vehicle route planning to further improve the network access quality for individual vehicles and to enhance the performance of the entire ITS. In this paper, we investigate joint route and access network selection for an individual vehicle in a metropolitan scenario. We aim to improve the wireless data throughput of the target vehicle while guaranteeing its transportation efficiency requirements in terms of traveling time and distance. To achieve this objective, we first formulate the joint route and access network selection problem as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). The optimal policy of the SMDP is then derived based on value iteration. Sufficient simulations are conducted and numerical results demonstrate that the derived optimal policy significantly outperforms the existing work in terms of the total throughput and the late arrival ratio.