A New Collaborative Clustering Approach for the Internet of Vehicles (CCA-IoV)

Abstract

The advent of the Internet of Things has contributed to the development of traditional vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) into a new approach called the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which has recently been the subject of many researchers. For this purpose, many control mechanisms have been suggested for these networks to tackle their problems. Like dynamic topology changes due to high vehicles motion and the scalability issue due to the high number of vehicles connected. As a key mechanism used in the VANET, clustering has greatly enhanced performance in various applications. In this sight, the current study proposes a new collaborative clustering algorithm for the Internet of vehicles named: CCA-IoV, which takes advantage of the important computing and storage capabilities of modern vehicles to operate the clustering process. This latter is based on Node Score (SC) introduced by our approach and through cooperation between vehicles rather than access to remote servers. CCA-IoV reinforces the cluster stability structure by choosing a Vice Cluster Head as a supplement to the Cluster Head. We use the NS-2 network simulator and SUMO integrated environment to test the performance of the proposed scheme.