A study of the impact of merging schemes on cluster stability in VANETs

Abstract

Effective clustering algorithms are indispensable in order to solve the scalability problem in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Due to the highly dynamic network topology, an effective cluster merging scheme is always required in clustering algorithms, aiming to prevent the collapse of clusters. In the literature, there is a lack of comparison of cluster merging schemes, which makes it hard to analyze the impact of this component on clustering performance. In this paper, we analyze the existing cluster merging schemes and propose a Leadership-based Cluster Merging (LCM) scheme. Then, a comprehensive comparison of different cluster merging schemes under various traffic scenarios is presented, and our scheme is shown to achieve better performance on cluster stability.