A Connectivity-Prediction-Based Dynamic Clustering Model for VANET in an Urban Scene

Maintaining network connectivity is an important challenge for vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) in an urban scene, which has more complex road conditions than highways and suburban areas. Most existing studies analyze end-to-end connectivity probability under a certain node distribution model, and reveal the relationship among network connectivity, node density, and a communication range. Because of various influencing factors and changing communication states, most of their results are not applicable to VANET in an urban scene. In this article, we propose a connectivity prediction-based dynamic clustering (DC) model for VANET in an urban scene. First, we introduce a connectivity prediction method (CP) according to the features of a vehicle node and relative features among vehicle nodes. Then, we formulate a DC model based on connectivity among vehicle nodes and vehicle node density. Finally, we present a DC model-based routing method to realize stable communications among vehicle nodes. The experimental results show that the proposed CP can achieve a lower error rate than the geographic routing based on predictive locations and multilayer perceptron. The proposed routing method can achieve lower end-to-end latency and higher delivery rate than the greedy perimeter stateless routing and modified distributed and mobility-adaptive clustering-based methods.