Hybrid Weighted-based Clustering Routing Protocol for Railway Communications

In the paper, a hybrid clustering routing strategy is proposed for railway emergency ad hoc network, when GSM-R base stations are destroyed or some terminals (or nodes) are far from the signal coverage. In this case, the cluster-head (CH) election procedure is invoked on-demand, which takes into consideration the degree difference from the ideal degree, relative clustering stability, the sum of distance between the node and it’s one-hop neighbors, consumed power, node type and node mobility. For the clustering forming, the weights for the CH election parameters are allocated rationally by rough set theory. The hybrid weighted-based clustering routing (HWBCR) strategy is designed for railway emergency communication scene, which aims to get a good trade-off between the computation costs and performances. The simulation platform is constructed to evaluate the performance of our strategy in terms of the average end-to-end delay, packet loss ratio, routing overhead and average throughput. The results, by comparing with the railway communication QoS index, reveal that our strategy is suitable for transmitting dispatching voice and data between train and ground, when the train speed is less than 220km/h.