Traffic Scheduling for Energy Sustainable Vehicular Infrastructure

Roadside infrastructure can be used provide a wide variety of commercial services in vehicular ad hoc networks. One particular challenge is that of providing roadside radio coverage in highway locations where wired electricity is not available. In this case, roadside access points (APs) powered by renewable energy such as solar power, is a viable alternative. The cost of provisioning this type of roadside infrastructure is dependent on the average power consumption of the AP, and can be reduced by energy efficient scheduling. In this paper, we consider the problem of satisfying vehicle communication requirements while minimizing the energy needed by the roadside access point. The problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) which provides an upper bound for the performance of any realizable scheduling algorithm. We then propose a Nearest Fastest Set (NFS) scheduler that uses vehicle location and velocity inputs to address the problem. Results from a variety of experiments show that the proposed scheduling algorithm performs well when compared to the performance bound.