Enhancing Vehicular Network Performance Through Integrated RSU and UAV Deployment

Abstract

The increasing density of connected vehicles can place substantial pressure on fixed roadside infrastructure, particularly when the available communication resources become insufficient to accommodate temporary traffic surges. This paper investigates auxiliary unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assistance as a flexible mechanism for improving service availability and throughput in vehicular networks. Two representative network configurations are considered. In the first, an auxiliary UAV (UAVa) supplements two fixed roadside units (RSUs), whereas in the second, UAVa assists a heterogeneous infrastructure comprising one RSU and one UAV. Vehicle service is determined according to node coverage, the line-of-sight (LoS) probability of aerial links, and a prescribed signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirement. The resulting framework enables UAVa to accommodate eligible vehicles that cannot be adequately served by the primary infrastructure as the network load increases. Simulation results show that, under the considered configurations, the aerial nodes benefit from more favorable propagation conditions and achieve higher throughput than the fixed terrestrial RSU. Moreover, the introduction of UAVa increases the available service capacity under high vehicular loads, both for a purely terrestrial baseline and for a network already supported by an aerial node. These results demonstrate the potential of auxiliary UAV assistance as a flexible load-relief mechanism for capacity-constrained vehicular networks.