Using road IDs to enhance clustering in vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) where vehicles act as mobile nodes is an instance of Mobile Ad hoc NET-works (MANETs), which are essentially developed for intelligent transportation systems. A challenging problem when designing communication protocols in VANETs is coping with high vehicle mobility, which causes frequent changes in the network topology and leads to frequent breaks in communication. The clustering technique is being developed to reduce the impact of mobility between neighboring vehicles. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Weighted Cluster Protocol for VANETs, which is a road map dependent and uses road IDs and movement direction in order to make the clusters structure as stable as possible. The experimental results reveal that AWCP outperforms four other most commonly used clustering protocols in terms of control packet overhead, the packet delivery ratio, and the average cluster lifetime, which are the most usual metrics used for comparing performance.