| User desire for ubiquitous applications on-board a vehicle motivates the necessity for Network Mobility (NEMO) solutions for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs). Due to the dynamic topology of VANETs, this approach incurs excessive infrastructure cost to maintain stable connectivity and support these applications. Our solution to this problem is focused on a novel NEMO-based Network Architecture where vehicles are the main network infrastructure. Within this Architecture, we present a Network Criticality-based clustering algorithm, which adapts to mobility changes to form stable self-organizing clusters of vehicles and dynamically builds on vehicle clusters to form more stable Mobile Networks. Simulation results show that the proposed method provides more stable clusters, lower handoffs and better connectivity compared to popular density-based vehicle clustering methods. In addition, they confirm the validity of the proposed Network Architecture. The proposed method is also robust to channel error and exhibits better performance when the heterogeneity of vehicles is exploited. |
