A Comparison of Backbone and Mesh Clustering Strategies for Collaborative Management of 6G Vehicle-to-Vehicle Exchanges

Abstract

Sixth-generation (6G) announcements promise the best performance not only for latency but also for the number of connected objects. These characteristics particularly suit intelligent transport system (ITS) applications involving a large number of moving vehicles with stringent latency constraints. Moreover, in the 6G era, these applications will often operate while relying on direct cooperation and exchanges between vehicles, in addition to centralized services through a telecommunication infrastructure. Therefore, addressing collaborative intelligence for ad hoc routing protocols that ensure efficient management of multihop vehicle-to-vehicle communications is mandatory. Among the numerous organization models proposed in the literature, the chain–branch–leaf (CBL), a virtual backbone-like model, has demonstrated best performance regarding latency against the state-of-the-art approaches. However, its structure, which lacks redundancy, may lead to higher data loss in the case of the failure of one of the relaying branch nodes. This study investigated how the multipoint relay (MPR) technique—which is intrinsically redundant—used in the optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol can be efficiently adapted to the road traffic context, especially by restricting MPR selection to a single traffic flow direction (TFD-OLSR). The simulation results confirmed that CBL-OLSR obtains the least end-to-end delay for various types of application traffic due to its efficient reduction in the number of relays and the amount of routing traffic. However, despite higher routing traffic, TFD-OLSR improves the delivery rate, especially for more than two-hop communications, thus demonstrating the benefits of its redundancy property.