A Stable Clustering Architecture for Efficient Routing and Resource Allocation in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is an area of wireless networks, which makes connections among vehicles to enable vehicle to vehicle or vehicle to infrastructure communication and supports diversified applications related to road safety, data transfer, offloading resources etc. Although significant efforts have been made since the last few decades, there are still a huge number of research problems to be solved in VANET. Link stability is one of them. To make link stable, many researchers have applied single-hop and multi-hop clustering approaches to make links stable to increase connectivity time. In this work, we have used the idea of a multi-hop clustering that makes links more stable. We have applied the idea of forwarding node that connects one cluster to other clusters through cluster head resulting higher link stability. We have also extended our work to utilize the developed cluster architecture for resource allocation, which is another important area of research for vehicular applications. We applied the idea of multi-hop clustering with the forwarding node to make the link stable and minimize the time for allocating the resource and minimize the time to calculate when a node moves from one cluster to another cluster. Extended simulation has been done using SUMO and NS3 to compare the proposed clustering algorithm with other similar approaches in the literature. The results show the efficacy of our proposed algorithm in terms of different performance parameters.