Affinity Propagation with file similarity based clustering for P2P file sharing in VANET

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) has been widely discussed and many issues have been identified these years. Due to VANET´s rapid change of structure and unstable properties, many studies proposed to use clustering architecture to improve network performance. However, most of the cluster architectures are suitable only for broadcasting applications and not applicable to p2p file sharing. In this paper, we propose a File-based Affinity Propagation Cluster (FAPC) that has the joint advantages of movement similarity and file similarity. Besides, FAPC uses adaptive cluster head election time to determine the most appropriate cluster time interval to elect cluster head adapting to traffic density. FAPC is proved to be applicable to p2p file sharing in VANET. Simulations results show that FAPC outperforms both Shea´s APROVE [1] and Taleb´s Social Cluster-based Overlay Structure [2] in terms of query hit ratio, retrieved file ratio, average number of clusters and average cluster head duration^.