An efficient requirement-aware attachment policy for future millimeter wave vehicular networks

The automotive industry is rapidly evolving towards connected and autonomous vehicles, whose ever more stringent data traffic requirements might exceed the capacity of traditional technologies for vehicular networks. In this scenario, densely deploying millimeter wave (mmWave) base stations is a promising approach to provide very high transmission speeds to the vehicles. However, mmWave signals suffer from high path and penetration losses which might render the communication unreliable and discontinuous. Coexistence between mmWave and Long Term Evolution (LTE) communication systems has therefore been considered to guarantee increased capacity and robustness through heterogeneous networking. Following this rationale, we face the challenge of designing fair and efficient attachment policies in heterogeneous vehicular networks. Traditional methods based on received signal quality criteria lack consideration of the vehicle's individual requirements and traffic demands, and lead to suboptim...