TruClu: Trust Based Clustering Mechanism in Software Defined Vehicular Networks

Vehicular ad hoc Networks have emerged as a viable alternative for enabling user applications on moving vehicles. However, maintaining acceptable levels of Quality of Service and message latency still remains a challenging task. Several solutions have been proposed for improving performance of these networks. Clustering has been considered as one of the important mechanism that structures vehicles into organize groups. However, high deployment overheads and lack of security are the major bottlenecks hindering its deployment. Software defined networking has been emerged as a promising solution on account of its characterstics such as dynamic access control and scalabilty. In view of this, TruClu: a trust based clustering mechanism that creates vehicular clusters for a Software Defined Vehicular Network is proposed. Cluster formation and cluster head selection in TruClu is based on vehicular mobility and trust value that alleviates the drawbacks of traditional clustering and also enabling trust based communication in the network. The performance of TruClu is evaluated through extensive simulations and obtained results indicate the comparable performance of the proposed scheme in terms of standard performance parameters.