Parked Car-based Clustering Hierarchy in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network for Energy Efficiency

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) technology has emerged as an important research area over the last couple of years due to their wide assortment of applications and services such as passenger safety, efficient traffic management and infotainment. However, establishing an efficient VANET model is one of the most serious problems due to the shortage of resources. To overcome this problem, many researchers considered the use of parked vehicles. In this paper, we propose a clustering approach for VANET called parked car-based clustering hierarchy (PCCH) scheme, which utilizes the parked cars for data dissemination. In this proposed PCCH model, the vehicular nodes on the road will form several numbers of clusters. Each cluster will have a cluster head (CH) and each CH will be able to communicate with parked cars beside the roads. These parked cars will act as relay nodes for the CH or a road side unit (RSU) when no RSUs are available nearby. Numerical simulation method is followed to analyze the performance of the proposed PCCH scheme and found that it provides about 60% higher energy efficiency than parked carbased without clustering hierarchy protocol, which are some recently proposed parked car-based network models that did not use clustering in the road.