Neighbor stability-based VANET clustering for urban vehicular environments

In this paper, we propose a neighbor stability-based VANET clustering (NSVC) that can efficiently deliver data in urban vehicular environments. The salient features of urban vehicles are their high mobility and unpredictable direction of movement, so vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) communication should take into consideration the frequent changes in the topology of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). These technical challenges are addressed with NSVC by including a neighbor stability-based VANET clustering scheme and the corresponding supplementary transmission scheduling method. Thereby, NSVC supports fast cluster formation, minimizes the number of cluster head elections, and moreover guarantees the reliable delivery of data for emergency messages. The results of the simulation indicate that NSVC achieves better network performance when compared to existing approaches.