Analytical Exploration of Energy Savings for Parked Vehicles to Enhance VANET Connectivity

With the development of vehicular ad hoc networks, the shortage of resources is becoming increasingly serious. To alleviate this problem, many researchers have suggested the use of parked vehicles, but these proposals do not consider that parked vehicles cannot continue charging when they are turned off; this problem is termed the limited energy problem. In this paper, we consider the use of parked vehicles as relay nodes and introduce an optimal method of enabling parked vehicles to provide services in the most energy-efficient manner. The core method is divided into two steps: 1) the clustering of moving vehicles based on their communication coverage and the selection of parked vehicles between clusters as relay nodes to ensure communications among driving vehicles and 2) the dynamic use of external environmental factors to achieve energy conservation. Simulation results show that the proposed energy-saving method achieves obvious improvements compared with other parked-vehicle-based methods.