Small LTE Base Stations Deployment in Vehicle-to-Road-Infrastructure Communications

Rational and efficient handling of vehicular traffic and people movement is already nowadays a huge challenge that increasingly needs to be supported by dedicated technologies. Scenarios like Smart Cities and Smart Roads are therefore among the most promising areas in which major technological breakthroughs are expected in the next two decades. The delivery of end user services in these scenarios surely call for an ensemble of different technologies to be displaced together; for successful deployment of such technologies and for positive and effective impact on daily life, one of the most important factors is certainly the efficient, fast and flexible distribution of information. The possibility to transmit a large quantity of data is of course necessary in these kind of scenarios, but is not to be separated from the possibility to have higher spectral efficiency and higher flexibility of spectrum configuration. Another key factor is the cost of the network infrastructure, which can easily become a showstopper even for the most promising service or technology. In fact in recent years, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-road-infrastructure (V2I) communications have attracted great interest for the potentially extended usage in traffic applications and emergency situations. While in the former case the communication system is realized by means of an ad-hoc network (denoted as VANET), in the latter vehicles, i.e. mobile terminals, exchange data packets each other and with the Internet by means of a base station (BS) situated close to the road side. So, in V2I the BS controls the network and manages the connections with and between the vehicles, simplifying the vehicle transceiver and improving performance, including the reliability of emergency communications.