Performance of a double cluster head routing scheme in a motorway environment

To restore the performance of the system due to the failure of a BS, we propose a hybrid vehicular communication system which introduces a novel double cluster head (DCH) routing scheme. Using vehicular traces from loop Ids on the M4 motorway in the UK, the performance of the system is evaluated and compared with the single cluster head (SCH) routing scheme under different configurations. Even though, clustering techniques address the problem of scalability, excessive overheads present a challenge especially to the cluster heads in the process of cluster formation/deformation, cluster update and cluster head selection. To balance the load of the cluster head and improve the inter-cluster communication, we propose a double cluster head (DCH) routing scheme which uses more bits to choose one more cluster head but the performance of the system is significantly improved. To evaluate the performance and compare it with the single cluster head (SCH) routing scheme, we have considered a scenario where a BS failure causes a significant amount of loss in terms of higher packet dropping probability, higher average access delay and lower throughput.