A New Heuristic Clustering Algorithm Based on RSU for Internet of Vehicles

The emergence of the Internet of Things has led to the evolution of conventional Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) toward a new paradigm called the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). This latter has recently received the attention of many researchers. In order to overcome the different challenges, such as high mobility, the number of connected vehicles and the big data, clustering, as an important technique used in a VANET, has significantly improved the performance of numerous applications. In this regard, the present work proposes a new heuristic clustering algorithm based on RSU called HCAR for IoV, which entails the centralization of a clustering algorithm at distributed RSUs. This latter is responsible for performing the cluster formation phase based on a simple heuristic algorithm, using graph theory concepts, such as node degree and adjacency matrix. In addition, HCAR uses a new mechanism to recover the problem of the unavailability of cluster head (CH), through the election of a secondary CH using a weighted mechanism. Moreover, HCAR takes care of the maintenance phase to keep clusters’ stability and structure. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is proven theoretically, and the simulation results, in the NS-2 and VanetMobiSim integrated environment, show its performance advantages.