A Data Transfer Scheme Using Autonomous Clustering in VANETs Environment

An ad hoc network is a decentralized network that consists of mobile nodes with wireless communication devices without the aid of access points. A Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) is one of the representative application of ad hoc networks. Epidemic Routing has been proposed as a routing protocol based on Store-Carry-Forward mechanism for VANETs environment. However, in Epidemic Routing, network resources such as packet buffer of a node are significantly consumed because data packets are spread across the network. Therefore, this paper proposes a new data forwarding scheme that combines Epidemic Routing and autonomous clustering for VANETs environment. The proposed scheme configures multiple clusters in the network and then only the cluster head that manages the cluster stores and forwards data packet to mitigate the consumption of network resources. Finally, this paper presents the simulation results to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.