CAMVC: Stable Clustering Algorithm for Efficient Multi-hop Vehicular Communication on Highways

Research and development on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have expanded rapidly in the last few years. VANETs have many challenges due to the high nodes mobility and dynamic topology, which lead to frequency network disconnections. Clustering algorithms are effective techniques to reduce network disconnections by organizing the work of the network nodes. This paper proposes a stable clustering algorithm for efficient multi-hop vehicular communication (CAMVC), which takes the cluster's speed, acceleration, closeness centrality, and position parameters into consideration. Our approach aims to increase the cluster lifetime by electing the best cluster heads and find the best gateways to connect the clusters with each other by improving the calculations of their link connectivity duration. We compared our proposed algorithm with other clustering and gateway selection algorithms in terms of stability to prove the effectiveness of CAMVC.