Adaptive cooperative communications for enhancing QoS in vehicular networks

In a vehicular network with high mobility, it is challenging to ensure reliable and efficient connections among vehicles and between vehicles and roadside communication units (or infrastructure) such as base stations or WiFi hot spots. In this paper, we propose a method that utilizes cooperative communications for a combined vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) approach to improving quality of service (QoS) across the vehicular network. In this approach, we have obtained the closed-form expressions of key QoS performances such as outage probability, throughput, energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio, packet loss rate and average end-to-end-delay for different investigated transmission schemes. These performances can be optimized by adaptively selecting appropriate transmission schemes and, as a results, good trade-offs between system reliability and efficiency can also be achieved under various environmental conditions.