Abstract-Several Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) studies have focused on the communication methods based on IEEE 802.11p, which forms the standard for Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments (WAVE). In the networks employing IEEE 802.11p only, the broadcast storm and disconnected network problems at high and low vehicle densities respectively degrade the delay and delivery ratio of safety message dissemination. Recently, as an alternative to the IEEE 802.11p based VANET, the usage of cellular technologies has been investigated due to their low latency and wide range communication. However, a pure cellular based VANET communication is not feasible due to the high cost of communication between the vehicles and the base stations, and high number of hand-off occurrences at the base station considering the high mobility of the vehicles. This paper proposes a hybrid architecture, namely VMaSC-LTE, combining IEEE 802.11p based multi-hop clustering and the fourth generation cellular system, Long Term Evolution (LTE), with the goal of achieving high data packet delivery ratio and low delay while keeping the usage of the cellular architecture at minimum level. In VMaSC-LTE, vehicles are clustered based on a novel approach named VMaSC: Vehicular Multi-hop algorithm for Stable Clustering. The features of VMaSC are cluster head selection using the relative mobility metric calculated as the average relative speed with respect to the neighboring vehicles, cluster connection with minimum overhead by introducing direct connection to the neighbor that is already a head or member of a cluster instead of connecting to the cluster head in multiple hops, disseminating cluster member information within periodic hello packets, reactive clustering to maintain cluster structure without excessive consumption of network resources, and efficient size and hop limited cluster merging mechanism based on the exchange of the cluster information among the cluster heads. These features decrease the number of cluster heads while increasing their stability therefore minimize the usage of the cellular architecture. From the clustered topology, elected cluster heads operate as dual-interface nodes with the functionality of IEEE 802.11p and LTE interface to link VANET to LTE network. Using various key metrics of interest including data packet delivery ratio, delay, control overhead and clustering stability, we demonstrate superior performance of the proposed architecture compared to both previously proposed hybrid architectures and alternative routing mechanisms including flooding and cluster based routing via extensive simulations in ns-3 with the vehicle mobility input from the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO). The proposed architecture also allows achieving higher required reliability of the application quantified by the data packet delivery ratio at the cost of higher LTE usage determined by the number of cluster heads in the network.
Ucar et al. REF proposed a novel multihop clustering scheme, known as VMaSC, which selects CHs based on relative mobility with respect to its neighbors.
Multi-Hop Cluster based IEEE 802.11p and LTE Hybrid Architecture for VANET Safety Message Dissemination
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
Computer Science