Efficient Vehicular Ad Hoc Network routing protocol using weighted clustering technique

Abstract

The Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) technology is similar to the Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) in operations. But due to high dynamics of vehicles as compare to mobile nodes in MANET, the routing protocols of MANET cannot be applicable for the VANET communications. The high mobility leads the challenges of frequent link breaks and hence poor Quality of Service (QOS) performance. The clustering based routing protocols solves this problems to some extent, however performing the efficient and lightweight clustering and cluster head (CH) selections is still the complex problem for VANETs. The main causes of such problems are related to key parameters such as mobility and geographical distances of vehicles while performing the clustering tasks. In given paper we present a lightweight CH selection and cluster formation by considering mobility and number of neighbors based on geographical distances of the vehicle key parameter at every clustering interval to achieve the stability in network. The superiority of this method is that it is simple and inclusively the part of regular routing operations. For each vehicle the weight is computed to become the CH using mobility and neighbors parameter, hence this method is called as Weight based Clustering for VANET (WCV) routing protocol. The simulation result proves the QOS efficient performance compared to the state-of-art protocols. The WCV protocols improved the overall throughput by 10% as compared to the recent clustering protocol and reduced the delay 7% approximately.