Navigation Route Based Stable Clustering for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Due to high mobility of vehicles, stability has been always one of the major concerns of vehicle clustering algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel clustering algorithm based on the information of route planned by vehicular navigation systems. Including route information into cluster mechanism is not trivial due to two issues: (i) stability is a property of time rather than position, (ii) route diversity may cause high re-clustering overhead at road intersections. To address the first issue, we propose a function to quantitatively calculate the overlapping time among vehicles based on route information, with which a novel clusterhead selection metric is designed. To address the second issue, we design a mechanism of future-clusterhead, which can help avoid message exchanges at intersections. The simulation results show that, compared with similar works, our algorithm can cluster vehicles with higher stability and at the same time lower communication cost.