Design and Optimization of Cluster-Based DSRC and C-V2X Hybrid Routing

With the continuous development of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) and Internet of Vehicle (IoV) technologies, various application scenarios have put forward higher requirements for vehicular communications. On the one hand, applications related to vehicle driving safety require lower latency and higher throughput. On the other hand, users who use cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) to transfer data will have to face high communication fees due to the increasing amount of data. Therefore, from the perspective of balancing quality of service (QoS) and user communication costs, this paper integrates dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and C-V2X, two vehicular communication technologies with their own advantages, into a framework called cluster-based traffic differentiated hybrid routing (CTDHR), to provide services for in-vehicle communication. A vehicle clustering method based on hierarchical clustering is proposed to solve problems (e.g., the communication linking being difficult to maintain and the frequent cell handover due to high-speed movement of vehicles). The CTDHR framework is modeled on the resulting clusters and an objective equation was established. Finally, since the obtained objective equation is a nonlinear integer programming problem, we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve this optimization problem. In the simulation experiments, CTDHR shows better communication performance than the existing DSRC and C-V2X hybrid models. The experimental results show that CTDHR can reduce the communication costs of users while satisfying QoS.