Dynamic Mobility Based Multi Hop Clustering Algorithm in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

 Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are one of the various outstanding technologies for an intelligent transportation system that take away vehicle-to-vehicle type multi-hop ad hoc networks. Due to the high dynamic nature of the vehicles, clustering is an effective way to alleviate the problem of frequent communication interruption. In recent years, most of research works have been point out that clustering can increase the constancy of the cluster by using similar mobility patterns of the vehicles. Also, Extensive research has explored clustering algorithms for VANETs to satisfy the requirements of their new features. Most of these studies are based on one-hop clustering, which only allows communication between a cluster member (CM) and its cluster head (CH) with one-hop distance.  The coverage of clusters is small in one-hop clustering, which leads to excess CHs and high maintenance overhead. Therefore, several multi-hop clustering algorithms have been proposed in the past years. These algorithms can extend the coverage of clusters, reduce the number of CHs, and improve cluster stability. However, some issues remain in multi-hop clustering for VANETs like, cluster un-stability, maintenance cost problem. So, in this paper, a dynamic mobility based multi hop clustering (DMMHC) algorithm is proposed in multi-hop cluster scenario. The proposed scheme applies vehicle's moving direction, relative position and link lifetime estimation to maintain cluster stability and reduce the maintenance cost, communication cost between cluster members. The Extensive simulation experiments are performed using NS3 tool to demonstrate our proposed algorithm. The results show that our proposed algorithm can improve the performance of the cluster in terms of average cluster head duration, average cluster member duration, average state changes. Moreover, the number of rebroadcast hello packets is also reduced.