Towards modeling vehicular networks with power-performance trade-offs

Abstract

Vehicular networks are gaining increasing significance due to real-time communication and decision-making capabilities of vehicles and their interaction with road-side units. Power Management is critical for roadside units since they are typically powered on for servicing requests from vehicles. In this work, we envision low-power proxy servers to act on behalf of roadside units during periods of minimal activity to enable roadside units to be powered down resulting in power savings. However there exists a need for modeling of vehicular networks with roadside units and proxy servers for analyzing power-performance trade-offs. Towards this goal, we develop a queueing model to understand the impact of highway traffic on the power consumed by roadside units and proxy servers and further propose a threshold based approach for power savings. Our experiments conducted using real traces demonstrate that the proposed approach is traffic-aware in that it balances the trade-off between power consumption and delay.