A Comparative Review on State-of-the-art Clustering techniques for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Advancements in wireless technologies have given start to the exposure of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). It is a special kind of Mobile ad-hoc network that has a capability to provide communication among vehicles in a close proximal space. Moreover, VANETs even have capability to support the communication between the vehicles and some special kind to nearby equipment’s that are fixed on roadsides commonly named as Road Side Units (RSU). The main goal of VANETs is to reduce vehicular traffic and to provide comfortable and safe journey to passengers. In VANETs there are certain limitations i.e. dynamic topology changes, high mobility of nodes, packet loss, rapid pattern movement and network fragmentation. There is a great risk involved during communication in VANETs. To provide safe and reliable communication among nodes, clustering techniques are designed. With the dynamic nature of VANETs, stability of clusters is a very key challenging task. Several clustering algorithms has been presented by the researchers based on the stability of cluster formation. This paper surveys and analyzes the state-of-the-art clustering techniques designed for stability of clusters and safe communication.