Abstract
Efficiently propagating adequate and effective traffic information to drivers helps to increase driving safety and improves traffic conditions on highways. To achieve this, we designed a mobility-adaptive information reduction scheme (MAIR scheme) which creates a mobility-adaptive cluster to represent local traffic information and makes use of the assembly procedure to derive traffic information. The purpose of the scheme is to simplify individual high-speed movements and reduce the large number of information broadcasts. In the simulation, network performance was compared with another clustering protocol by a metric of effective propagation rate under two different traffic scenarios. The simulation proves that our solution is an efficient multi-source and multi-hop forwarding framework which allows well-connected vehicular networks to disseminate a higher degree of correct traffic information, especially for highway safety-related information. © 2012 IEEE.