Vehicular multitier gateway selection algorithm for heterogeneous VANET architectures

Cooperative intelligent transportation systems have become an active topic with the introduction of smart communications between vehicles, increasing driver safety, traffic efficiency and ultimately paving way for autonomous vehicles. These vehicular communications have stringent transmission requirements. Among various proposed communication protocols, use of heterogeneous networks, combining long term evolution (LTE) with dedicated short range communications (DSRC), have shown promising results. This paper proposes an LTE gateway selection procedure that enables multitier hybrid architecture. The proposed multitier heterogeneous adaptive VANET (MHAV) framework consists of two tiers, the high tier consist of authority owned vehicles or public transport operators such as buses, lorries and taxis, while low tier consist of privately owned vehicles. Having an authority owned gateway addresses the security and privacy concern raised by private car owners on sharing their information with other cars. Results from implementation of our proposed algorithm using extensive system-level simulations showed an increase in coverage area for DSRC while minimizing the number of gateway switches made by 30–35% in comparison with previously proposed multitier registration techniques. Traffic on LTE network in our simulations is also reduced by 50%.