Greening vehicular networks with standalone wind powered RSUs: a performance case study

The need for reducing the carbon footprint and reducing the operation expenditure (OPEX) in communication networks poses several challenges in the study, design and deployment of energy efficient networks in different environments. Recently there has been a considerable effort to green vehicular networks which is very challenging due to the very dynamic environment in which these networks operate. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the roadside units (RSUs) in a vehicular motorway network, and propose that these units are wind-powered and act as standalone entities. Real vehicular traffic profiles, reported data traffic measurements and reported wind measurements have been utilised to perform this study. We analyse the performance in several test cases and suggest an operational scenario. Both analytical and simulation results reveal that with the introduction of sleep cycles and a very small battery capacity (124 mAh), these RSUs are able to support quality of service (QoS) for video-related applications at each hour of the day in a motorway vehicular environment while increasing the energy efficiency by up to 32%.