Energy-Spectral Efficiency Optimization in Vehicular Communications: Joint Clustering and Pricing-Based Robust Power Control Approach

Abstract

Smart, and green cities impose stringent requirements on spectral efficiency (SE), and energy efficiency (EE) of vehicular networks. For the current vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), vehicle's mobility leads to rapid topology changes, and high channel uncertainty. However, clustering schemes for establishing stable clusters, and robust power control (RPC) combating with channel fluctuation are investigated independently. In this paper, joint clustering, and RPC schemes are proposed to optimize the SE, and EE of the involved VANETs. Via the same fixed-length slot, the synchronized interference constraints of cluster heads (CHs) are formed, and offer conditions for RPC. Due to the random channel fluctuations, all CHs’ synchronized interference constraints are formulated as probability constraints. Besides, a pricing-based utility which avoids the separate optimization between SE, and EE is introduced, and the price's impact on the tradeoff between them is involved. Since the probability constraints are intractable, and the unified utility is nonconvex, the Bernstein approximation, and successive convex approximation (SCA) are used to transform the problem into a tractable convex one. Through dual decomposition, two RPC algorithms are proposed to determine the optimal solutions for the fixed price $C$ , and the optimal price $C^*$ , respectively. Numerical simulations are used to evaluate the algorithmic performances in high-dynamic system, and the results show that the proposed algorithms are effective. The validity of the clustering method, and the proposed RPC scheme is further verified by comparisons.