Traffic Differentiated Clustering Routing in DSRC and C-V2X Hybrid Vehicular Networks

Vehicles equipped with sensors can participate inmobile crowdsourcing applications. Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks(VANETs) based on Dedicated Short Range Communication(DSRC) are used to carry sensing data. However, multi-hoptransmissions for gathering data to Road Side Units (RSUs) inVANETs suffer from low data rate and long end-to-end delay,which can hardly meet the QoS requirements of delay-sensitiveservices. This triggers the consideration of constituting a DSRCand Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) hybrid vehicularnetwork. Nevertheless, using cellular links to carry traffic cancause high cellular bandwidth costs. In this paper, we proposea Traffic Differentiated Clustering Routing (TDCR) mechanismin a Software Defined Network (SDN)-enabled hybrid vehicularnetwork. The proposed mechanism includes a centralized one-hopclustering approach and a data delivery optimization method.Particularly, the optimization is to make a tradeoff betweencellular bandwidth cost and end-to-end delay, for Cluster Heads(CHs) delivering their aggregated data either by multi-hopVehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) transmissions or by cellular networks.Since the problem is proven to be NP-hard, a two-stage heuristicalgorithm is designed. We carry out simulations to evaluate theperformance of our data collection scheme and the results showthat it performs better than traditional mechanisms (Less)