Stability and Trust-Aware Multi-Hop Vehicular Clustering with Parent Persistence

This study specifies a multi-hop vehicular clustering algorithm combining a stability factor (SF), parent persistence under a hysteresis margin, trust-gated parent eligibility and road-side-unit (RSU)-assisted maintenance. Five stateful implementations are compared across four scenarios with 20 paired seeds per condition. Counting singleton heads, SF’s CH tenure is longest on the baseline and high-inflow highways (restricted mean to 120 s: about 52 s versus 21–37 s), but not on the low-inflow highway or the urban arterial. This head-level advantage does not extend to cluster affiliation. SF’s urban direct-parent persistence (70.19 s) exceeds MCSC and Center-based but not Weighted-MR (90.95 s). SF has higher root-change rates in ten of sixteen contrasts and shorter fixed-root membership persistence in thirteen. In a controlled study, composite SF reduces root changes relative to mobility-only scoring by 9–11 per 1000 vehicle-seconds at h = 0.08, versus 133–313 from the margin. Degree-only contrasts confound scoring with effective retention. Nominal trust filtering reduces the dropped-attempt fraction from 15.62% to 0.37%, but erroneous penalties still reduce honest-parent eligibility.