ECDGP: extended cluster-based data gathering protocol for vehicular networks

An important application in wireless networks is data collection. It aims to gather and deliver specific data for concerned authorities. Many researchers invest in vehicular ad hoc networks for that purpose to acquire data from different sources on the roads as from its vicinity. A vehicle is considered as a mobile data collector, it gathers real-time or delay-tolerant data such as road traffic, environmental information, and event advertisements. In a previous work, we have proposed a novel clustered data gathering protocol (CDGP) for vehicular ad hoc network, which improves the collection performance by implementing a new space division multiple access technique called dynamic space division multiple access and a retransmission mechanism in case of errors. However, CDGP supports only delay-tolerant data as it does not use any aggregation technique. In this paper, we propose an enhancement of this protocol by extending it to support: (i) both real-time and delay-tolerant applications; (ii) multiple types of data; and (iii) aggregation of collected data prior to sending them to the initiator. We present the plausible analytical complexity of the extended CDGP, as we illustrate the superiority of its performance throughout the results obtained from simulation experiments, using a Freeway mobility model.