PassCAR: A passive clustering aided routing protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a promising architecture for vehicle-to-vehicle communications in the transportation field. However, the frequent topology changes in VANETs create many challenges to data delivery because the vehicle velocity varies with time. Thus, designing an efficient routing protocol for stable and reliable communication is essential. Existing studies show that clustering is an elegant approach to efficient routing in a mobile environment. In particular, the passive clustering (PC) mechanism has been validated as a more efficient approach compared to traditional clustering mechanisms. However, the PC mechanism was primarily designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), and may be unsuitable for constructing a cluster structure in VANETs because it does not account for vehicle behavior and link quality. In this paper, we propose a passive clustering aided routing protocol, named PassCAR, to enhance routing performance in the one-way multi-lane highway scenario. The main goal of PassCAR is to determine suitable participants for constructing a stable and reliable cluster structure during the route discovery phase. Each candidate node self-determines its own priority to compete for a participant using the proposed multi-metric election strategy based on metrics such as node degree, expected transmission count, and link lifetime. Simulation results show that, compared with the original PC mechanism, PassCAR not only increases the successful probability of route discovery, but also selects more suitable nodes to participate in the created cluster structure. This well-constructed cluster structure significantly improves the packet delivery ratio and achieves a higher network throughput due to its preference for reliable, stable, and durable routing paths. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.