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Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging technology for the future intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). The current researches are intensely focusing on the problems of routing protocol reliability and scalability across the urban VANETs. Vehicle clustering is testified to be a promising approach to improve routing reliability and scalability by grouping vehicles together to serve as the foundation for ITS applications. However, some prominent characteristics, like high mobility and uneven spatial distribution of vehicles, may affect the clustering performance. Therefore, how to establish and maintain stable clusters has become a challenging problem in VANETs. This paper proposes a link reliability-based clustering algorithm (LRCA) to provide efficient and reliable data transmission in VANETs. Before clustering, a novel link lifetime-based (LLT-based) neighbor sampling strategy is put forward to filter out the redundant unstable neighbors. The proposed clustering scheme mainly composes of three parts: cluster head selection, cluster formation, and cluster maintenance. Furthermore, we propose a routing protocol of LRCA to serve the infotainment applications in VANET. To make routing decisions appropriate, we nominate special nodes at intersections to evaluate the network condition by assigning weights to the road segments. Routes with the lowest weights are then selected as the optimal data forwarding paths. We evaluate clustering stability and routing performance of the proposed approach by comparing with some existing schemes. The extensive simulation results show that our approach outperforms in both cluster stability and data transmission.

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