Planning roadside infrastructure for information dissemination in intelligent transportation systems

We consider an intelligent transportation system where a given number of infrastructured nodes (called Dissemination Points, DPs) have to be deployed for disseminating information to vehicles in an urban area. We formulate our problem as a Maximum Coverage Problem (MCP) and we seek to maximize the number of vehicles that get in contact with the DPs over the considered area. The MCP is known to be NP-hard in its standard formulation, therefore we tackle it through heuristic algorithms, which present different levels of complexity and require different knowledge on the system. Next, we address the problem of guaranteeing that a large number of vehicles travel under the coverage of one or more DPs for a sufficient amount of time. We therefore give a different formulation of the problem, which however is still NP-hard and requires a heuristic approach to be solved. By evaluating the proposed solutions in a realistic urban environment, we observe that simple heuristics provide near-optimal results even in large-scale scenarios. However, we remark that a near-optimal coverage of mobile users can be achieved only when the characteristics of vehicular mobility are known.