A geographical segment architecture for connected vehicle networks

Abstract

Equipped with wireless transceivers, vehicles can be connected into a vehicular ad hoc network to collect, share and utilize data for a variety of purposes, such as safety, navigation and entertainment. As diverse sensors are integrated into vehicles and large numbers of wireless access points are deployed within cities, far more data can be collected and utilized to support smarter applications. However, the data explosion puts further strain on the broadcasting and routing protocols which are already challenged by the high mobility vehicular environment. In this paper, we propose a geographical segment architecture (GSA) which clusters vehicles based on their geographic locations with respect to road segments. Leveraging on a two-tier architecture, consisting of segment heads and ordinary vehicles, the GSA can exploit cluster IDs to implement efficient broadcasting strategies and routing protocols. We propose three GSA-based routing protocols: GSA-SR (which uses reactive routing), GSA-GR (which uses geographic routing) and IGSAR (which is infrastructure based). Extensive simulations of connected vehicular networks in three road topology scenarios (City, Rural, and Highway) show that GSA-based protocols can achieve relatively higher performance than existing protocols in terms of throughput, packet delivery rate, delay and protocol overhead.