Towards Smarter Cities and Roads: A Survey of Clustering Algorithms in VANETs

This chapter highlights the importance of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) in the context of smarter cities and roads, a topic that currently attracts significant academic, industrial, and governmental planning, research, and development efforts. In order for VANETs to become reality, a very promising avenue is to bring together multiple wireless technologies in the architectural design. Clustering can be employed in designing such a VANET architecture that successfully uses different technologies. Moreover, as clustering addresses some of VANETs' major challenges, such as scalability and stability, it seems clustering will have an important role in the desired vehicular connectivity in the cities and roads of the future. This chapter presents a comprehensive survey of clustering schemes in the VANET research area, covering aspects that have never been addressed before in a structured manner. The survey presented in this chapter provides a general classification of the clustering algorithms, presents some of the most advanced and latest algorithms in VANETs, and in addition, constitutes the only work in the literature to the best of authors' knowledge that also reviews the performance assessment of clustering algorithms