A Load-balancing algorithm in clustered VANET networks / Mai Ragaie Ahmed ; Supervised Mohammed H. Nafie , Tamer Abdelmotelab Elbatt , Omar A. Nasr

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Engineering- Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering

Vehicular ad-hoc Network (VANET) is an important part of the Intelligent Transportation Systems. There are two different types of communication in VANET networks. Vehicles to vehicles communications and vehicles to infrastructure communications to support Internet access as well as several safety applications. VANET Networks have some challenges due to the specific characteristics of moving vehicles such as changing network topology related to the high velocity of vehicles, and unlimited VANET connections regarding the road conditions. As the number of vehicles increases, each roadside unit (RSU) has to handle a large number of data traffic streams from vehicles in the rush hour. The capacity of a single RSU is not enough to handle the connections from a large number of vehicles. Without a proper data traffic distribution, RSU load will be congested at crowded areas and the packet drop ratio will be high. In this thesis, a load balancing algorithm between different roadside units using VANET networks formed in clusters is proposed. The information exchanged between vehicles and RSUs is considered in this thesis. The proposed algorithm aims to direct data traffic to the appropriate roadside unit with minimum load to avoid congestion and achieve balance in data traffic among roadside units. Clustering is employed, which reduces the overhead in VANET networks and allows a minimum number of vehicles to communicate with RSUs. Clustering is the process of dividing VANET networks into partitions according to the road structure. The algorithm uses a gateway vehicle to move data traffic from a heavily loaded RSU to a lightly loaded one. Two different types of data traffic in the network are considered: real-time data traffic with high transmission priority and non-real time data traffic with low priority. When an RSU is heavily loaded, the gateway is used to direct the low priority data traffic to a lightly loaded RSU

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