An Application-Aware Clustering Strategy in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network

VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc Network) was developed to address the unique challenges of communication in a mobile vehicular environment. This technology can enhance driving safety and traffic control. Moreover, similar principles can be applied to unmanned aerial vehicles and robotics. When transmitting data in moving vehicles, it is challenging as access points and base stations keep changing, requiring handovers between different access points and base stations. Clustering is a popular approach used to address this challenge. Common clustering strategies are based on the proximity, communication range, the density, the application requirements of the moving vehicles, or hybrid of them. In this paper, we propose a clustering strategy based on the application sublayer in the vehicle communication protocol. If two computing devices on the move run the same application, they can be grouped together. The contribution of this research is to develop a clustering mechanism based on the application with very low overhead. We also validate the proposed method through simulations. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method is feasible.