Cluster-Based Multi-Hop Transmission Techniques in Vehicular Communications Networks

Abstract

In recent years, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have gained popularity as a reliable means of ensuring road safety and comfort. Current standards in vehicular communications can be used for safety-related information transmission, but in the future, new applications such as autonomous controlled vehicles will require more reliability and capacity with a short latency. Furthermore, multi-hop data transfer for roadside emergencies is not explicitly allowed. Vehicular communications has various appealing features. Due to vehicle movement, however, network topology changes frequently and extremely quickly. As a result, inter-vehicle connectivity may be severely harmed. Furthermore, barriers such as buildings at crossroads or trucks on the highway frequently block line-of-sight signal components. As a result, signal attenuation is significant. As a consequence, high-reliability and low-latency multi-hop data transfer in vehicle-to-vehicle communications should be investigated. Cooperative communications are well-known in wireless communications as a technology that allows single-antenna nodes to benefit from traditional MIMO systems. It is challenging to build a path route from the source node to the destination node in multihop relay communications while selecting efficient cooperative relays. Due to the unique properties of V2V communications, standard MANET routing methods are not suited for most applications in multi-hop vehicular communications. This is because one or more routes from a source node to a certain destination node must be discovered before a data packet can be transmitted in these routing protocols. As a result, these protocols are ineffective in cases involving several destination nodes. However, in order to achieve high reliability in wireless multi-hop communications, the most efficient cooperative relays for each hop must be chosen. In addition, the amount of broadcast packets and the network’s power consumption must be lowered while the system’s performance is improved, reducing mutual interference in the shared radio channel. Therefore, we present several strategies to achieve the requirements.