Mobility-based clustering algorithm for multimedia broadcasting over IEEE 802.11P-LTE-enabled VANET

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) facilities envision future Intelligent Transporting Systems (ITSs) by providing inter-vehicle communication for metrics such as road surveillance, traffic information, and road condition. In recent years, vehicle manufacturers, researchers and academicians have devoted significant attention to vehicular communication technology because of its highly dynamic connectivity and self-organized, decentralized networking characteristics. However, due to VANET’s high mobility, dynamic network topology and low communication coverage, dissemination of large data packets (e.g. multimedia content) is challenging. Clustering enhances network performance by maintaining communication link stability, sharing network resources and efficiently using bandwidth among nodes. This paper proposes a mobility-based, multi-hop clustering algorithm, (MBCA) for multimedia content broadcasting over an IEEE 802.11p-LTE-enabled hybrid VANET architecture. The OMNeT++ network simulator and a SUMO traffic generator are used to simulate a network scenario. The simulation results indicate that the proposed clustering algorithm over a hybrid VANET architecture improves the overall network stability and performance, resulting in an overall 20% increased cluster head duration, 20% increased cluster member duration, lower cluster overhead, 15% improved data packet delivery ratio and lower network delay from the referenced schemes [46], [47] and [50] during multimedia content dissemination over VANET.