A new framework of self-organization of vehicular networks

Vehicular networks are drawing a great attention from the research community and the automotive industry, where they are beneficial in providing ITS (Intelligent Transportation System) services as well as assisting the drivers on the road. In this context, vehicular networks are based on V2I (Vehicle to Infrastructure) and V2V (Vehicle to Vehicle) communications. The special characteristics of these networks such as high mobility, potentially large scale, and network partitioning introduce several challenges, which greatly impact the deployment of these networks. An efficient solution to these problems is to define a robust self-organizing architecture. Thus, the function of these dynamic networks can be quite improved. In this paper, we introduce a new proactive self-organizing protocol called CSP (Cluster-based Self-organizing Protocol) that uses the geographic clustering and the virtual backbone to structure intelligently the vehicular network. We compare CSP to other self-organizing solution by analyzing its performances using Qualnet simulator. Simulation results show good performance of CSP in terms of architecture stability, overhead and delivery ratio.