CSP: Cluster-based Self-organizing Protocol for vehicular networks

Vehicle communication (VC) represents an interesting item for both research and industry communities, since it supplies an efficient way to improve the transport quality. However, VC is confronted with a number of new challenges, in particular due to the extremely dynamic network topology and the large variable number of mobile nodes. To overcome these problems, an effective solution is to define a convenient and robust self-organizing architecture that facilitates the network management task and permits to deploy wide panoply of services In this paper, we propose CSP (cluster-based self-organizing protocol), a proactive self-organizing protocol that structures intelligently the vehicular network by portioning roads into adjacent segments and where vehicles located in the same segment form one cluster. We compare our protocol to existing solutions and we analyze its performance using simulation and realistic mobility models.