Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) have drawn incredible interest in both academic and industrial sectors due to their potential applications and services. Vehicles’ position plays a significant role in many location-based applications and services such as public emergency, vehicles tracking, resource discovery, traffic monitoring and position-based routing. A location service is used to keep up-to-date records of current positions of vehicles. However, locating vehicles’ positions and maintaining an accurate view of the entire network are quite challenging tasks due to the high number of nodes, and high and fast nodes mobility which results in rapid topological changes and sudden network disconnections. In the past literature, various location-based services have been proposed to solve the above mentioned issues. Moreover, the cluster-based location service schemes have gained a growing interest due to their advantages over non-cluster-based schemes. The cluster-based schemes improve the network scalability, reduce the communications overhead and resolve the mobility issues within the clusters preventing them from propagating in the whole network. Therefore, this paper presents the taxonomy of the existing location service schemes, inspects the cluster-based location service by highlighting their strengths and limitations, and provides a comparison between location-based clustering and application specific clustering such as the one used in routing, information dissemination, channel access management and security. In addition, the existing clustering schemes, challenges and future directions for efficient cluster-based location service are also discussed.

车载自组织网络（VANET）的潜在应用和服务已经引起了学术界和工业界的极大兴趣。车辆的位置在许多基于位置的应用程序和服务中扮演着重要角色，例如公共紧急情况，车辆跟踪，资源发现，交通监控和基于位置的路线选择。定位服务用于保持车辆当前位置的最新记录。但是，由于节点数量众多，节点移动性高而又快，这会导致快速的拓扑变化和突然的网络断开，因此，定位车辆的位置并保持整个网络的准确视图是非常具有挑战性的任务。在过去的文献中，已经提出了各种基于位置的服务来解决上述问题。此外，基于群集的位置服务方案比基于非群集的方案更具优势，因此引起了越来越多的关注。基于群集的方案可提高网络可伸缩性，减少通信开销并解决群集内的移动性问题，从而防止它们在整个网络中传播。因此，本文提出了现有位置服务方案的分类法，通过强调它们的优势和局限性来检查基于群集的位置服务，并提供了基于位置的群集与特定于应用程序的群集之间的比较，例如用于路由，信息的群集。传播，渠道访问管理和安全性。此外，还讨论了有效的基于群集的位置服务的现有群集方案，挑战和未来方向。