A Data Uploading Strategy In Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks Targeted On Dynamic Topology: Clustering And Cooperation

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a special network composed of driving vehicles with dynamic topology. Data uploading from the VANET to the computation server is a challenging issue due to the high mobility of vehicles. By introducing the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) server deployed on the roadside, this paper proposes a stable clustering strategy based on adjacency screening and designs an Intra-Cluster Data Uploading (ICDU) algorithm to improve the efficiency of data uploading in a dynamic environment. The connection lifetime between vehicles is taken as a key indicator for our proposed clustering strategy to form stable clusters. After the formation of clusters, the ICDU algorithm plans a stable path for vehicles in a cluster to upload data in a cooperative method. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed clustering strategy performs better in terms of the clustering stability compared with Vehicular Multi-hop algorithm for Stable Clustering (VMaSC) and the greedy clustering strategy. The results also prove that our proposed ICDU algorithm outperforms the self-uploading algorithm and can achieve a larger data uploading throughput in the dense scenario compared with the greedy-uploading algorithm.