A Stable Clustering Architecture for Efficient Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Link stability poses an important role on the efficiency of routing in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Due to several reasons, it is very challenging to predict and improve link stability in vehicular networks. First of all, the mobility of nodes are very high, which frequently disconnects communicating nodes and creates links unstable. Secondly, the topology will change dynamically as nodes can join and leave that makes cluster maintenance a non-trivial challenge to solve. In this paper, we provide a stable clustering architecture that considers link stability and mobility in vehicular networks to reduce overhead for cluster formation and maintenance. The proposed architecture improves routing efficiency by using least number of hops from source to destination. To validate the proposed clustering architecture extensive simulation has been done using SUMO and NS3 environment. We have done some detailed comparison with some other clustering algorithms from the recent literature and results show the efficacy of our proposed architecture and algorithm.