Dynamic Clustering and Cooperative Scheduling for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication in Bidirectional Road Scenarios

Efficient data dissemination is critical for enabling emerging applications in vehicular ad hoc networks. As a typical traffic scenario, the bidirectional road scenario of highways bring unique challenges on well exploiting the benefit of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication for data sharing among vehicles driving in opposite directions. This paper is dedicated to investigating the characteristics of data services in such a scenario and exploring new opportunities for enhancing overall system performance. Specifically, we present a system architecture to enable the road-side unit assisted data scheduling via vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. Then, we give a theoretical analysis on the opportunity of successful data sharing among vehicles driving in opposite directions based on the analysis of signal-to-interference-noise-ratio of V2V communication. On this basis, we propose a clustering mechanism based on the design of a time division policy and the derivation of the optimal cluster length. In addition, a cluster association strategy is designed to enable vehicles to dynamically join or leave a cluster based on their real-time velocities. Furthermore, a two-phase backoff mechanism is designed for distributed data sharing based on V2V communication, and a cooperative scheduling algorithm is proposed for selecting sender vehicles as well as the corresponding data items for broadcasting. Finally, we build the simulation model and give a comprehensive simulation study, which demonstrates that the proposed solutions can effectively improve the overall system performance.