Nowadays vehicles on the roads can communicate using a special type of wireless network called Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). It has been demonstrated by the researchers that because of the unique features such as high density of vehicles and frequent change of network topology, VANETs are not supported by the traditional routing protocols. The routing consistency of such highly dynamic networks must be taken into account in VANETs as communication links are disintegrated in VANETs more

more »

... en than Mobile ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). The nature of VANET communication can bring extreme routing overhead to the network, therefore to increase network performance, the overhead issue must be tackled. The proposed protocol is focused on reducing the overhead to get the improved PDR performance of the network. The improvement is achieved by permitting communication amongst only those nodes which are considered reliable in terms of availability and geographical position. The reliability factor simply reduces unnecessary nodes from the communication process and selects a set of reliable nodes that are discovered with the help of clustering technique throughout the routing process. Simulation experiments using the network simulator are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed protocol. The results show that the proposed protocol has enhanced network performance effectively compared to prior approaches. INDEX TERMS ad-hoc networks, reliable VANET, K-Means