Cluster-based D2D architecture for safety services in vehicular ad hoc networks

With the expected introduction of autonomous vehicles in the next decade, it will be imperative for road traffic authorities to develop strategies to manage the co-existence of autonomous and legacy vehicles. In this scenario, the exchange of safety messages among vehicles in a timely manner will be critical for future advanced road traffic management systems. Most of the work in the area of vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) has concentrated on the IEEE 802.11p and the DSRC standards. With the emergence of the advanced LTE-based cellular network standard, researchers are now concentrating on the LTE-based VANET architecture. However, due to the use of the centralized architecture, an LTE-based system may require significant network resources to support vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. In this paper, we propose a new vehicle discovery technique and a LTE cluster-based device-to-device (D2D) architecture to achieve high packet delivery ratio for the safety services in a vehicular network. The performance of the proposed network architecture is analyzed by an OMNET++ based simulation model. Simulations results shows that the proposed algorithm reduces the end-to-end delay and signalling overhead as well as improve the data packet delivery ratio (DPDR) compared to the existing 3GPP ProSe technique for vehicular safety applications.