A cluster-based routing algorithm for VANET

Inter-vehicle communication is a major part of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is one of the most promising applications of Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) which was primarily developed to improve safety and comfort for vehicles, passengers and drivers. There are many challenges in VANET which must be improved to provide a reliable service. These challenges include network architecture, routing algorithms, and security. Because of high mobility and changeable infrastructure, stable and reliable routing in VANET is one of the major issues. Existing routing algorithms for VANET are divided into five major classes: AdHoc, position-based, broadcast, Geocast and cluster-based. Among them, cluster-based algorithms have received more attention by researchers because such algorithms try to keep the network performance in an acceptable level even though the network may consist of many mobile nodes. In this paper a cluster-based routing algorithm is proposed which is scalable, efficient and distributed. In the proposed algorithm when selecting the cluster head the speed deviation of vehicles as well as the remaining time to destination is taken into account. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has lower End-to-End delay compared with CBLR algorithm.