Successful Delivery in VANETs with Damaged Infrastructures Based on Double Cluster Head Selection

Disconnected communication is one of the results of infrastructure failure due to the direct impact of natural disasters. This paper proposes a solution to the failure of packet transmission in Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) in disaster cases where vehicles encounter disconnected communication. Clustering is one of the most common routing protocols in VANET. Clustering protocols are proven to be highly effective in a scalable network. For stable cluster formation in VANET, some constraints such as vehicles velocity and vehicles separation distance must be considered while selecting the cluster head. The cluster head is the node responsible for data propagation to the infrastructure. This paper tackles the problem when the cluster head is unable to successfully transmit the packets to the infrastructure due to its failure in crisis scenario. A new clustering algorithm based on a weighted formula for cluster head selection is proposed. The weighted formula is based on three parameters: the trust, the distance, and the velocity. The protocol will ensure to have overlapping clusters with double cluster heads thus guaranteeing the successful packet delivery to the destination. The proposed protocol had been simulated using MATLAB to ensure that the packets are delivered to their destination in a reasonable delay.