Performance evaluation of passive clustering based techniques for inter-vehicle communications

Inter-vehicle communication is one of the most significant transmission behaviors for diverse transportation applications in the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). The existing studies have showed that clustering is a promising solution to data communication under the mobile environment, and especially the passive clustering (PC) technique is the efficient one compared to other clustering techniques. However, the original PC technique does not take into account the unique characteristics of VANETs, and thus it may face many challenges to inter-vehicle communication. This paper proposes three PC-based techniques, called VPCs, to determine the suitable vehicles to become the main participants in cluster structure formation. VPCs consider numerous metrics, such as vehicle density, link quality, and link sustainability. Simulation results demonstrate that VPCs collectively exhibit better performance than the PC technique in packet delivery ratio, delivery delay, and network throughput.