A Center-Based Secure and Stable Clustering Algorithm for VANETs on Highways

Currently, communications in the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) can be established via both Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) and mobile cellular networks. To make use of existing Long Term Evolution (LTE) network in data transmissions, many methods are proposed to manage VANETs. Grouping the vehicles into clusters and organizing the network by clusters are one of the most universal and most efficacious ways. Since the high mobility of vehicles makes VANETs different from other mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the previous cluster-based methods for MANETs may have trouble for VANETs. In this paper, we introduce a center-based clustering algorithm to help self-organized VANETs forming stable clusters and decrease the status change frequency of vehicles on highways and two metrics. A novel Cluster Head (CH) selection algorithm is also proposed to reduce the impact of vehicle motion differences. We also introduce two metrics to improve the security of VANETs. A simulation is conducted to compare our mechanism to some other mechanisms. The results show that our mechanism obtains high stability and lower packet loss rate.