Enhanced cluster stability in vehicular ad hoc network

Abstract

Traffic management has been and remains to be a major problem especially in urban areas with high vehicle density. Adoption of intelligent transport system (ITS) has been widely experimented with the intention of curbing traffic menace with mixed experiences as the outcome. By communicating with other vehicles travelling on the same road in form of clusters, vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) forms an ITS that can allow cooperation of vehicles with less human input. By considering the high mobility nature of the vehicles in VANET, this paper presents a solution to the main menace of VANET clustering by adopting the flexibility of fuzzy logics for cluster formation on a multilane urban highway. It also shows that the stability of clusters is improved by performing the cluster head (CH) selection process based on a combination of fuzzy logics, lane weighting, and utility function with the fuzzy membership function adjusted to increase stability of clusters.