Route-based Radio Coverage Analysis of Cellular Network Deployments for V2N Communication

Cellular vehicle-to-network (V2N) communication will be the backbone of the connected vehicles of future. One of the key requirements of the connected vehicles is a near universal coverage on the streets. Traditional radio network planning for cellular coverage is done with raster format whereby all pixels in a network area have equal weighting. Whereas, for V2N communication the target is to primarily ensure continuous network coverage on the streets. In this work, a route-based methodology which is pertinent for V2N coverage analysis is presented. This method adds another key parameter into consideration, namely, the base stations (BS) deployment schema. Existing cellular networks, whereby, small base stations (BSs) are deployed at the macro BS cell-edge, at traffic hotspots or to compensate for coverage holes, may not be sufficient for V2N coverage especially at millimeter wave (mmWave) carrier frequencies. Herein, we perform the coverage analysis for an existing small BS deployment as well as for an ultra-dense deployment at 2 GHz, 5GHz and 28 GHz carriers. The statistics for signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio (SINR) and achieved rate are aggregated by a large number of realistic vehicular routes from Google Directions application programming interface (API). This work was supported by Academy of Finland (under grants 311752 and 287249). It was also partially funded by the 5G-MOBIX project which has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 825496. The work by Mario Garcia-Lozano has been funded by the Spanish ministry of science through the project RTI2018-099880-B-C32, with ERFD funds.