A novel cluster-based protocol for topology discovery in vehicular ad hoc network

This paper presents a novel cluster-based network topology discovery approach for VANET by taking into account both vehicle connectivity and vehicle mobility. It is a fast convergent approach with load balancing to significantly improve the scalability of VANET. The numerical results obtained from both theoretical analysis and simulations have shown that the cost of topology discovery using the proposed approach is only two percent of a typical link state protocol under the same condition. Especially for a large network, the proposed approach is not only able to suppress the increase rate of the total cost when the number of vehicles in the network increases, but it reduces the passive effect of vehicle mobility on control overhead.