VANET Cluster-on-Demand Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) Prim clustering algorithm

Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication offers great potential as far as information dissemination in VANETs is concerned. Research has shown that clustering vehicles and relaying information through cluster-heads (CHs) has several advantages over allowing all the vehicles to broadcast the information. Forming and maintaining stable clusters as well as ensuring good QoS in intra-cluster communications has always been a great challenge. In this paper we present a VANET Cluster-on-Demand (CoD) Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) Prim algorithm which clusters vehicles taking into consideration the intra-cluster QoS. Matlab simulation results of the algorithm applied to real traffic data has shown the algorithm's ability to successfully form clusters with good QoS. The algorithm has also been shown to compare very well with Dijkstra's algorithm which is one of the best clustering algorithms.