Reduction of Routing Overhead in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication using Clustering in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract

VANET (Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks) is intended to achieve ITS (Intelligent Transportation System). It is the sub-category of MANET. VANET enables a set of vehicles which are in communication range of each other to establish a network among them to communicate with each other vehicles and RSUs (Road Side Units). It is known as Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication respectively. These communications will help the vehicles to share the traffic information, media to achieve ITS. Several routing protocols were there to make this communication possible. Some of them are DSR (Dynamic Source Routing), AODV (Ad Hoc on-Demand Distance Vector Routing), and DSDV (Destination Sequenced Distance Vector). In all this existing protocols routing overhead is high which is not desirable. Due to high mobility or high topology change of nodes in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), there are frequent connection breakages which lead to frequent route discoveries. The routing overhead of a route discovery is more when there are more connection or link failures. So, routing overhead cannot be neglected, it reduces the QoS (Quality of Service) of a routing protocol. So, to reduce this overhead a cluster based algorithm is proposed. Basic idea of proposed algorithm is to divide the simulation area into clusters and electing a cluster head for each cluster, we only communicate with cluster heads for any request there by reducing the overhead to find route from source to destination many times.