A major challenge in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is the ability to account for resource sharing and location management so that multicasting/routing functions and bandwidth reservations can be organized efficiently. By creating clusters of vehicles we are able to control resource sharing and management functions in VANETs that are highly dynamic. In this paper, a D-hop clustering algorithm, called DHCV is presented which organizes vehicles into non overlapping clusters which have adaptive sizes according to their respective mobility. The D-hop clustering algorithm creates clusters in such a way that each vehicle is at most D hops away from a cluster head. To construct multi-hop clusters, each vehicle chooses its cluster head based on relative mobility calculations within its D-hop neighbours. The algorithm can run at regular intervals or whenever the network formation changes. One of the features of this algorithm is tendency to re-elect the surviving cluster heads whenever the network structure changes. Extensive simulation results have been done under different scenarios to show the performance of our clustering algorithm.
['Meysam Azizian', 'Soumaya Cherkaoui', 'Abdelhakim Hafid']
A distributed D-hop cluster formation for VANET