Joint Optimization of Relay Selection and Transmission Scheduling for UAV-Aided mmWave Vehicular Networks

To deal with the explosive growth of mobile traffic, millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications with abundant bandwidth resources have been applied to vehicular networks. As mmWave signal is sensitive to blockage, we introduce the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided two-way relaying system for vehicular connection enhancement and coverage expansion. How to improve transmission efficiency and to reduce latency time in such a dynamic scenario is a challenging problem. In this paper, we formulate the joint optimization problem of relay selection and transmission scheduling, aiming to reduce transmission time while meeting the throughput requirements. To solve this problem, two schemes are proposed. The first one is the random relay selection with concurrent scheduling (RCS), a low-complexity algorithm implemented in two steps. The second one is the joint relay selection with dynamic scheduling (JRDS), which fully avoids relay contentions and exploits potential concurrent ability, to obtain further performance enhancement over RCS. Through extensive simulations under different environments with various flow numbers and vehicle speeds, we demonstrate that both RCS and JRDS schemes outperform the existing schemes significantly in terms of transmission time and network throughput. We also analyze the impact of threshold selection on achievable performance.