Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communication are described. A user equipment (UE) may determine to use multi-cluster communications in a vehicle based communication network. The UE may identify a configuration parameter associated with the multi-cluster communications. The UE may select a cluster resource from a set of available cluster resources based on the configuration parameter. The cluster resource may include one or more clusters used for multi-cluster transmissions in the vehicle based communication network. The UE may transmit an indication of the selected cluster resource to a wireless node of the vehicle based communication network, for example, to another UE. The UE may transmit the multi-cluster transmission on the selected cluster resource.