Abstract
Vehicular networks have a diverse range of applications that varies from safety applications to comfort applications. Clustering in VANETs is of crucial importance for addressing the scalability problems of VANETs. The performance of communication protocols is greatly influenced by the existence of vehicles in the neighborhood; vehicles acting as obstacles change the behavior of protocols when different density, speed and car sizes scenarios are investigated since reliable communication range among vehicles varies. The Enhanced Spring Clustering is a new distributed clustering protocol, which forms stable clusters based on vehicle dimensions. An investigation of the performance of the Enhanced Spring Clustering in realistic environments is presented confirming its superiority over the examined, competing clustering protocol. © 2013 IEEE.