Clustering in Urban environments: Virtual forces applied to vehicles

Clustering of Vanets is a technique for grouping nodes in geographical vicinity together, making the network more robust and scalable. Clustering of vehicles that is based on virtual forces has been recently introduced for highways. We propose a new algorithm, called Virtual Forces Vehicular Clustering (VFVC), to create stable clusters in Urban environments where mobility patterns of vehicles is more spatial. The algorithm uses combined metrics produced by vehicle's position, geometry, relative velocity and vehicle's lane in order to assign virtual forces among them and create clusters. The performance of the proposed algorithm is examined against two baseline algorithms and Spring clustering (Sp - Cl). Results obtained show that VFVC performs better with a significant increase in cluster stability.