Chain-Branch-Leaf: A clustering scheme for vehicular networks using only V2V communications

Abstract The development of vehicular networks leads to a plethora of new applications that are already becoming essential to the drivers and to cooperative vehicles. One important condition to the continuity of these new services is the existence of an ubiquitous network access, which cannot be completely guaranteed. In this context, developing reliable ad hoc vehicle-to-vehicle communications is a good alternative that also becomes mandatory. This work proposes a clustering scheme that combines the information on road configuration, vehicle mobility and link quality in order to build a structure similar to a vehicular network infrastructure, while relying only on the vehicles. This clustering scheme can be integrated into any reactive, proactive, or geographic ad hoc routing protocol in order to optimize the flooding of messages and simplify routing operations. The evaluations realized through simulation show that the proposed clustering scheme allows creating and maintaining a stable backbone during a significant time. Moreover, the simulation results show that the proposed clustering scheme reduces significantly the impact of broadcast traffic flooding in comparison with well-established techniques such as multipoint relaying, to mention few.