An Approach to Control Safety Message Congestion in IoV Using Metaheuristic Clustering Algorithm

In Internet of Vehicle (IoV), the effective dissemination of safety messages is crucial for enhancing road safety, particularly given the dynamic nature of vehicle mobility and frequent link breakages. This problem is addressed by Cluster-Based MAC (CB-MAC) protocol designed to optimize safety message broadcasting by organizing vehicles into smaller clusters. Another strategy of vehicle ID based MAC protocol reduces the likelihood of transmission collisions by ensuring that vehicles possess distinctive identical back-off numbers. Each vehicle generates CAMs that include a unique vehicle identifier (ID), which is incorporated into a vehicle-specific random backoff mechanism. The protocol also avoids consecutive transmission by any vehicle by eliminating the risk of selecting zero as initial back-off number. To further enhance communication efficiency, our study amalgamates metaheuristic method for cluster formation, cluster head election, and cluster merging, allowing for effective intra- and inter-cluster communication along with CB MAC and vehicle id- based algorithms.