A Review on Clustering in VANET: Algorithms, Phases, and Comparisons

A Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a kind of mobile ad hoc network (MANET), where the nodes in VANET are vehicles. VANET is the main component for the development of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). VANET has a high dynamic topology due to continuous stopping and movement with different speeds of vehicles. These characteristics lead to untrustworthy information transmission in VANET. To enhance connection reliability and network scalability, clustering in VANET is introduced. It is a method of clustering network nodes into groups known as clusters. In this work, we provide a review of the most clustering algorithms presented between 1999 and 2020. Different clustering algorithms from the aspects of Cluster Head (CH) selection metrics, cluster formation according to hop distance, and cluster maintenance are explored. Also, different performance parameters used to evaluate the clustering approaches are summarized. Then, our proposed approach is summarized and compared with the most usable algorithms in literature to show its supremacy.