Energy-efficient cluster management in heterogeneous vehicular networks

Abstract

We consider the problem of energy-efficient cluster management in heterogeneous vehicular networks. In certain vehicular networking applications such as collision avoidance, multiple wireless technologies like Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) and LTE are combined to make use of both of their advantages. Thus, an optimum cluster management can be used to reduce the power consumption of Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) by centrally deciding methods. We first describe the system model and formulate the problem of energy-efficient Cluster Head (CH) selection as the p-median problem in graph theory. Then, we describe a direct enumeration method and a heuristic method to solve the problem by minimizing the total transmission power consumed by all the vehicles. Finally, simulation and comparison are performed to show the energy efficiency of our method.