Parked Vehicles as Cluster Heads and Gateways for Efficient Routing in VANET

Abstract

Abstract Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) refers to wireless connection of a large number of moving and stopped cars to transfer some knowledge about some events (e.g. accident, traffic jam, weather condition, etc.) to the passengers and drivers. The mobility of vehicles in unexpected directions destroys the network links and decreases the stability of the route between vehicles. This problem leads to repeat the routing discovery and maintenance operations and as a result increases the overhead and delay. Several classes of routing polices were proposed such as flat, hierarchical, cluster based, etc. Moreover, in the cluster based routing protocols, number of cluster head selection and cluster formation schemes have been suggested. Unfortunately, the stability of cluster heads and links was not satisfied. This paper aims to solve this problem by producing a new clustering formation technique. This technique selects the parked and stopped vehicles to work as cluster heads and gateway nodes with high stability. Moreover, a new cluster based routing protocol to build optimal paths with maximum stability and minimum delay called CRSD depending on optimization model is suggested. Several simulation scenarios with various mobility speeds and numbers of stopped and parked vehicles showed that CRDS is better than link reliability-based clustering approach (LRCA) and cluster-based VANET oriented evolving graph (CVoEG) according to network overhead, average end to end delay, path stability, and packet delivery ratio.