Distributed clustering in vehicular networks

Clustering in vanets is of crucial importance in order to cope with the dynamic features of the vehicular topologies. Algorithms that give good results in Manets fail to create stable clusters since vehicular nodes are characterized by their high mobility and the different mobility patterns that even nodes in proximity may follow. In this paper, we propose a distributed clustering algorithm which forms stable clusters based on force directed algorithms. The simulation results show that our Spring-Clustering (Sp-Cl) scheme has stable performance in randomly generated scenarios on a highway. It forms lesser clusters than Lowest-ID and it is better in terms of Cluster stability compared to Lowest-ID and LPG algorithms in the same scenarios.