On the joint V2I and V2V scheduling for cooperative VANETs with network coding

In the paper, we investigate the information spread problem in a joint vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication system. A scene is considered where more information centers (or base stations) are allocated along the road so that the information centers are able to broadcast timely messages to vehicles within the range of the broadcast signal of each base station, which we shall refer to as broadcast zone. The seamless information spread is used to guarantee that messages are correctly received by each vehicle, regardless of whether it pulls into broadcast zones or not. We first derive the maximum throughput of the V2I downlink system for both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels and Rayleigh fading channels with Doppler effects. A measurement-based algorithm to estimate the throughput is also proposed. We then discuss the maximum achievable amount of information that can be relayed forward along a vehicular stream. A network coding technique will then be proposed to cancel the interference caused by relay signals to vehicles that are receiving messages from the corresponding information center. These theoretical results will give more insight into the vehicular communication system design.