Abstract
Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems (VCPS) are the most popular systems of the modern era due to their abilities to disseminate the safety related information to the moving vehicles on time. For efficient data dissemination, vehicles form a cluster with other vehicles in VCPS environment. But, due to high velocity and constant topological changes, cluster maintenance is one of the most difficult tasks to be performed in this environment. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel Learning Automata (LA)-based hybrid clustering scheme for vehicles in VCPS environment. We have improved our existing solution Energy Efficient Predictive Clustering (EEPC) approach, by incorporating the future mobility prediction computed by LA stationed on the vehicles. For this purpose, a Predictive Clustering Algorithm using Learning Automata (PCALA) is proposed. Extensive simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme with respect to various metrics. Results obtained confirm the effectiveness, of the proposed scheme in comparison to the existing EEPC scheme. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.