MOSIC: Mobility-Aware Single-Hop Clustering Scheme for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks on Highways

As a new branch of Mobile ad hoc networks, Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have significant attention in academic and industry researches. Because of high dynamic nature of VANET, the topology will be changed frequently and quickly, and this condition is causing some difficulties in maintaining topology of these kinds of networks. Clustering is one of the controlling mechanism that able to grouping vehicles in same categories based upon some predefined metrics such as density, geographical locations, direction and velocity of vehicles. Using of clustering can make network's global topology less dynamic and improve the scalability of it. Many of the VANET clustering algorithms are taken from MANET that has been shown that these algorithms are not suitable for VANET. Hence, in this paper we proposed a new clustering scheme that use Gauss Markov mobility (GMM) model for mobility predication that make vehicle able to prognosticate its mobility relative to its neighbors. The proposed clustering scheme's goal is forming stable clusters by increasing the cluster head lifetime and less cluster head changes number. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has better performance than existing clustering approach, in terms of cluster head duration, cluster member duration, cluster head changes rate and control overhead.