VANET-LTE based heterogeneous vehicular clustering for driving assistance and route planning applications

To address these issues, we propose a novel destination- and interest-aware clustering (DIAC) mechanism. DIAC primarily incorporates a strategic game-theoretic algorithm and a self-location calculation algorithm. The former allows vehicles to participate/cooperate and enforces a fair-use policy among the cluster members (CMs), whereas the latter enables CMs to calculate their location coordinates in the absence of a global positioning system under an urban topography. DIAC strives to reduce the frequency of link failures not only among vehicles but also between each vehicle and the 3G/LTE network. The mechanism also considers vehicle mobility and LTE link quality and exploits common interests among vehicles in the cluster formation phase. The performance of the DIAC mechanism is validated through extensive simulations, whose results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed mechanism is superior to that of similar and existing approaches.