Leader selection in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks: a Proactive Approach

With the rapid advances in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, interest for leveraging V2V communications for different applications has also grown exponentially. Leader selection is an important task required in a number of V2V communications related applications. In this paper, a distributed leader selection algorithm is introduced for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) over unreliable V2V communications. The algorithm is simple, lightweight, and tightly integrated with SAE 2735 protocol for vehicular networks. The goal of the algorithm is to provide a robust leader selection method for a group of vehicles to determine a temporary leader in a short time, which could benefit several newly proposed applications based on V2V in traffic control and autonomous driving related areas. Simulation results have verified the excellent convergence time, robustness, and other aspects of the algorithm.