Traffic differentiated clustering routing in DSRC and C-V2X hybrid vehicular networks

Vehicles equipped with sensors can participate in
mobile crowdsourcing applications. Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
(VANETs) based on Dedicated Short Range Communication
(DSRC) are used to carry sensing data. However, multi-hop
transmissions for gathering data to Road Side Units (RSUs) in
VANETs suffer from low data rate and long end-to-end delay,
which can hardly meet the QoS requirements of delay-sensitive
services. This triggers the consideration of constituting a DSRC
and Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) hybrid vehicular
network. Nevertheless, using cellular links to carry traffic can
cause high cellular bandwidth costs. In this paper, we propose
a Traffic Differentiated Clustering Routing (TDCR) mechanism
in a Software Defined Network (SDN)-enabled hybrid vehicular
network. The proposed mechanism includes a centralized one-hop
clustering approach and a data delivery optimization method.
Particularly, the optimization is to make a tradeoff between
cellular bandwidth cost and end-to-end delay, for Cluster Heads
(CHs) delivering their aggregated data either by multi-hop
Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) transmissions or by cellular networks.
Since the problem is proven to be NP-hard, a two-stage heuristic
algorithm is designed. We carry out simulations to evaluate the
performance of our data collection scheme and the results show
that it performs better than traditional mechanisms