Routing protocols for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks resort to broadcast in order to achieve their main functionalities such as node discovery, topology dissemination, route discovery and self-organizing. In order to reduce the impact of routing traffic and other broadcast traffic generated by the applications, clustering is one of the main approaches widely investigated. Recently, the Chain-Branch-Leaf (CBL) scheme has been proposed to exploit the spatial constraints of the road in order to achieve an efficient clustering in Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks routing protocols. In this paper, CBL is enhanced in order to improve the stability of the individual clusters and that of the resulting backbone by extending the duration of the connections between cluster nodes and their cluster head. The evaluations through simulation establish its performance in comparison with some protocols available in OPNET and that are representative of the different routing approaches in ad hoc networks, namely AODV for reactive, OLSR for proactive and GRP for geographic routing. The results show that CBL allows better performance at the Wireless LAN level, but also that it still has a potential for improvement in terms of quality of service.

移动Ad hoc NETworks的路由协议求助于广播，以实现其主要功能，例如节点发现，拓扑分发，路由发现和自组织。为了减少路由流量和应用程序生成的其他广播流量的影响，群集化是广泛研究的主要方法之一。近来，已经提出了链支叶（CBL）方案来利用道路的空间约束，以便在车载Ad hoc NETworks路由协议中实现有效的聚类。在本文中，通过延长群集节点与其群集头之间的连接持续时间，对CBL进行了增强，以提高各个群集以及由此产生的主干的稳定性。与OPNET中可用的某些协议相比，通过仿真评估可以确定其性能，这些协议代表了ad hoc网络中不同的路由方法，即AODV用于响应式，OLSR用于主动式和GRP用于地理路由。结果表明，CBL可以在无线LAN级别上提供更好的性能，但是在服务质量方面，它仍然具有改进的潜力。