Abstract
In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), communication links break more frequently due to the high-speed vehicles. In this paper, a novel cluster-based VANET oriented evolving graph (CVoEG) model is proposed by extending the existing VoEG model to improve the reliability of vehicular communications. Here, the link reliability is used as a criterion for cluster members (CMs) and cluster heads (CHs) selection. The proposed CVoEG model divides VANET nodes (vehicles) into an optimal number of clusters (ONC) by using Eigen gap heuristic. In a given cluster, a vehicle will be selected as a CH, if it has a maximum Eigen-centrality score. Based on the CVoEG model, a reliable routing scheme called CEG-RAODV is proposed to find the most reliable journey (MRJ) from source to destination. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the existing schemes in terms of reliability, reliable routing request (RRR), packet delivery ratio (PDR), end to end (E2E) delay, and throughput.