A Novel Approach for Connectivity Improvement in Cluster Based VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have become an emerging field of interest as they facilitate the dissemination of critical information as well as the entertainment media among the Connected Vehicles (CVs). The information is made available to the vehicles in either a single hop i.e., directly through Access Point or through multi-hops via some intermediate CV. While the single hop is reliable but leads to large overhead; the multi hop communications preserve resources but suffer from higher delays and reduced link stabilities. In this paper, a novel transmission approach has been proposed which combines the benefits of both the aforementioned techniques while avoiding their limitations. The proposed scheme considers the received SINR by CVs to decide the best topology of the network in a given scenario. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme successfully achieves a balance between the performance of single hop and the resource utilization of dual hop transmission. It is able to achieve a Coverage Probability (CP) of 0.66 as compared to the best case of 0.84 with single hop transmission while utilizing only 80% of the resources as used by the single hop transmission. It has been shown that even with 40% of resource utilization, proposed algorithm performs better than the dual hop transmission by approximately 74%.