SeAC: SDN-Enabled Adaptive Clustering Technique for Social-Aware Internet of Vehicles

Since millions of smart vehicles in Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) produce and relay data to analyze road conditions, creating social networks of vehicles in IoV is an important factor for the future Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Likewise, the IoV architecture has seen vertical fragmentation of approaches used to meet the needs of different work domains. Therefore, IoV in combination with social networking, called Social IoV (SIoV), was created to address these alleged problems. However, one of the challenges in SIoV is that the social relations between vehicles grow and deplete very fast due to the extremely dynamic and unstable nature of the IoV. Therefore, a clustering-based scheme for SIoV, which is efficient in terms of stability can overcome this problem. We propose SeAC: an SDN-enabled adaptive clustering technique for SIoV. SeAC uses a 3D modeling approach to construct logical clusters that are based on factors such as physical location, social tie, and interest similarity among vehicles. Therefore, SeAC improves the stability of clusters and the efficiency of the underlying SIoV architecture. Additionally, by minimizing the trade-off between social and physical distances, SeAC lowers communication and computation costs. We evaluate SeAC, and the simulation results show that for two different topologies, the adaptive approach using SeAC can produce better results in terms of a stable cluster formation.