Clustering-based algorithm for connectivity maintenance in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Among recent advances in wireless communication technologies´ field, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have drawn the attention of both academic and industry researchers due to their potential applications including driving safety, entertainment, emergency applications, and content sharing. VANET networks are characterized by their high mobile topology changes. Clustering is one of the control schemes used to make this global topology less dynamic. It allows the formation of dynamic virtual backbone used to organize the medium access, to support quality of service and to simplify routing. Mainly, nodes are organized into clusters with at least one cluster head (CH) node that is responsible for the coordination tasks of its cluster. In this sight, our paper introduces a clustering mechanism based for connectivity maintenance in VANET. The proposed solution is experimentally evaluated using NS2 simulator.