Optimizing Node Communication in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Networks: A Relay Selection Algorithm Based on Multi-Metric Consensus Parameters

Relay selection is one of the major challenges that affect Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications. The inability to select the most important relay nodes during transmission has been a problem for many years. This has resulted to increased number of relay involvement, increased number of simulation runs and high cost of implementation, delay and data loss. This research proposed an intelligent algorithm called Multi-metric consensus algorithm. This algorithm considered position of the vehicles in a V2V network, distance and displacement angle of vehicles within the source node’s communication range. This algorithm involves some processes like distance matrix computation, adjacent matrix computation and the routing table computation. Based on the information of the nodes in the routing table, the relay node is selected. The simulation result of the Multi-metric consensus algorithm was compared with the conventional consensus algorithm. Multi-metric Consensus algorithm performed better by about 20% and 40% for number of algorithm runs and number of relay nodes involved respectively. The centralised method, consensus based algorithm and multi-metric consensus algorithm were compared in terms of cost of implementation, the Multi-metric consensus was cheaper by 90% and 85% for centralised and conventional consensus respectively, when considered for a period of five years. The performance analysis shows that, Multi-metric Consensus algorithm performs best when compared with conventional consensus algorithm and centralised method.