A Cluster Based Enhancement to AODV for Inter-Vehicular Communication in VANET

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) are a special kind of Mobile Ad-hoc network (MANET), in whichvehicles on the road forms the nodes of the networks. Now a days, VANETs find several applications as anIntelligent Transportation System(ITS). Dynamic network architectures and node movement characteristicsdifferentiates VANETs from other kinds of ad hoc networks. The dynamic change in topology shortens theeffective time of routing. Hence routing in VANETs is complicated. Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector(AODV) routing protocol is the most commonly used topology based routing protocol for VANET. Duringthe route discovery process AODV broadcasts route request message (RREQ). It creates many unusedroutes between a source and a destination node. This paper aims at improving the performance of AODVby enhancing the existing protocol by creating stable clusters and performing routing by Cluster Heads andGateway nodes.