An autonomous clustering-based data transfer scheme using positions and moving direction of vehicles for VANETs

An ad hoc network is a decentralized network that consists of mobile nodes with wireless communication devices without the aid of access points. A Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET) is one of the representative applications of the ad hoc network. Epidemic routing has been proposed as a routing protocol based on Store-Carry-Forward mechanism for VANET environment. However, in epidemic routing, network resources such as packet buffer of a node are significantly consumed because data packets are spread across the network. Therefore, this paper proposes a new autonomous clustering-based data transfer scheme using positions and moving direction of vehicles for VANETs. The autonomous clustering configures multiple clusters in the network and then only the cluster head that manages the cluster stores data packets. Whenever the cluster meets a new cluster, the cluster head of the cluster decides whether it should forward data packets to the new cluster based on Vehicle Information consisting of its own position, the destination node´s position, and moving direction of the cluster. Finally, this paper presents the simulation results to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.