A Novel Intelligent Cluster-Head (ICH) to Mitigate the Handover Problem of Clustering in VANETs

Abstract

The huge development in the number of Vehicle factories have resulted in many people having lost their life due to accident, which has made vehicular Ad-hoc networks (VANETs) hot topic to enable improved communication between vehicles aimed at reducing the loss of life. The main challenge in this area is vehicle mobility, which has direct effect on network stability. Thus, most previous studies that discussed clustering focused on cluster formation, cluster-head selection and the stability of cluster to reduce the impact of mobility in the network, with little attention given to the clusters when passing from base-station to neighbor base-station. Therefore, this study focused on handover problem that occurs after cluster formation and cluster-head election during cluster passing from base station to base station, known as overlapping area. As the cluster in an overlapping area receives two signals from different base stations, the signal arriving at the cluster becomes weak due to interference between two frequencies resulting in loss of cluster information in the overlapping area. In this study, proposed a novel method named Intelligent Cluster-Head (ICH), which is a controller on two clusters that are used to change uplink between clusters to solve the handover problem in the overlapping area. The proposed method was evaluated with VMaSC-1hop method. The proposed method achieved percentage of packet loss up to 0.8%, percentage of packet delivery ratio (PDR) 99%, percentage of number of disconnected links 0.12% and percentage of network efficiency 99% in the cells edge.