Abstract
The proliferation of fifth-generation (5G) networks toward vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication has paved the way for driverless autonomous vehicles (AVs) in vehicular critical energy infrastructures (CEI). Though technological advancements improve AVs, the safety-critical messages (SCMs) still play a vital role in reducing crashes, preventing injuries, and saving lives. AVs' high speed and complex network topology challenge disseminating SCMs with a highly successful delivery ratio and extremely low latency. Furthermore, the typical SCM dissemination schemes cause channel congestion and minimize the delivery ratio, making the systems incompatible with the AVs. Therefore, in this article, a software-defined-networking-assisted continuous clustering approach called migrating consignment region (MiCR) based on the federated K-means algorithm is proposed for disseminating SCMs to the AVs via 5G V2X communication. Unlike other methods that create clusters for every instance of SCM dissemination, MiCR continuously holds moving clusters for disseminating SCMs to AVs with ultrahigh reliability and low latency. The proposed MiCR approach has been simulated under real-time highway road maps and compared with other methods. The simulation results prove the superiority of MiCR in terms of network overload, SCM delivery ratio, latency, dissemination efficiency, and collision rate compared with the existing methods.