Joint Energy-Efficiency Communication Optimization and Perimeter Traffic Flow Control for Multi-Region LTE-V2V Networks

Energy-efficiency (EE) optimization of long-term evolution (LTE) networks dedicated to vehicle-to-vehicle communications (LTE-V2V) is critical for connected vehicles. In this paper, we integrate perimeter control methodologies from transportation science into EE optimization to make vehicular communications adaptive to temporal-spatial dynamics of macroscopic traffic flows in multiple urban regions. Specifically, we develop a hierarchical framework of joint LTE-V2V EE optimization and perimeter traffic flow control. Its goal is to minimize the total traffic network delay, defined as the integral of the vehicle accumulations in the urban regions over a prediction horizon time, meanwhile maximizing the energy efficiency of the LTE-V2V communications in the same regions. We propose a model predictive perimeter controller at a low level, using a macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) to capture the relationship between the traffic density and the outflow of each urban region. We also propose a high-level EE optimization model and an iterative algorithm, considering the multi-region coordinated traffic dynamics, to jointly optimize vehicular transmission power and beacon frequency. Simulation results validate our proposed models and show that our method outperforms the latest solutions by improving at least 9.57% EE of the multiple regions. Our method can also provide 27.69% improvement in resource utilization fairness, indicating a fairer EE performance distribution among these regions.