Energy Efficient Double Cluster Head Routing Scheme in a City Vehicular Network

Due to the rapid growth of high data rate applications substantial amount of energy is consumed by base station´s equipment. In order to save energy, it is better to deploy fewer base stations (BSs), switch off as many as possible, or use low power consuming ones. However, quality of service (QoS) is usually sacrificed to achieve such savings. In this paper, we reduce the number of BSs to save energy and study the performance of four routing schemes employing our city vehicular simulator to fulfil the QoS. While utilising the ad hoc mode, we show that it is important to put the maximum proportion of vehicles´ transceivers to the sleeping mode in order to save energy. To achieve this, we propose a new double cluster head (DCH) scheme in which only cluster heads (CHs) can undertake inter cluster communication. Our simulation results reveal that the proposed DCH scheme consumes 45% less energy compared to the fully functional vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) scenario and approximately 88% less energy compared to other routing schemes while attaining the required QoS.