A New Distributed Mobility-Based Multi-Hop Clustering Algorithm for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks in Highway Scenarios

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), due to the high dynamics of the vehicles, clustering is an effective way to alleviate the problem of frequent communication interruption. In recent years, many pieces of research have pointed out that clustering can improve the stability of the cluster by using similar mobility patterns of the vehicles. In this paper, we propose a new distributed mobility-based multi-hop clustering algorithm (DMMCA) in highway scenarios. DMMCA uses the vehicle's moving direction, relative speed and relative position to construct the multi-hop cluster. In addition, in order to reduce the overhead of the clustering algorithm, we design a new hello packet rebroadcast mode. Extensive simulation experiments are performed using ns-3 to demonstrate our proposed algorithm. The results show that our proposed algorithm can improve the performance of the cluster in terms of average cluster head duration, average cluster member duration, average state changes. Moreover, the number of rebroadcast hello packets is also reduced.