Handover Management in Multi-Hop Cluster based Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Handover management is one of the emerging trends in VANETs as it provides seamless connectivity throughout the communication process. No doubt handover management is a highly explored topic in the domain of VANETs but handover management in cluster based VANETs has not been given much attention. So, there is a need to focus on the issue of handover management in cluster based VANETs. In this paper, we have introduced an Enhanced Multi-hop Cluster based Algorithm (EMhCA) for providing smooth handover management in cluster based VANETs. This EMhCA is the improved multi-hop clustering algorithm which uses the concept of a cluster subordinate node that helps in solving handover problem in overlapping zone found in the cluster based VANET. The paper below presents a detailed description of the proposed algorithm. To analyse and validate the performance of proposed EMhCA, ns-3 and SUMO were used. From the simulation results it may be concluded that EMhCA has improved performance in terms of cluster stability and handover management as compared to the other cluster algorithms reported in the literature i.e. VMaSC, VMaSC-LTE and MhCA.