A Scalable Clustering Algorithm in Dense Mobile Sensor Networks

Abstract

Clustering offers a kind of hierarchical organization to provide scalability and basic performance guarantee by partitioning the network into disjoint groups of nodes. In this paper a scalable and energy efficient clustering algorithm is proposed under dense mobile sensor networks scenario. In the initial cluster formation phase, our proposed scheme features a simple execution process with polynomial time complexity, and eliminates the “frozen time” requirement by introducing some GPS-capable mobile nodes to act as cluster heads. In the following cluster maintenance stage, the maintenance of clusters is asynchronously and event driven so as to thoroughly eliminate the “ripple effect” brought by node mobility. As a result local changes in a cluster need not be seen and updated by the entire network, thus bringing greatly reduced communication overheads and being well suitable for the high mobility environment. Extensive simulations have been conducted and the simulation results reveal that our proposed algorithm successfully achieves its target at incurring much less clustering overheads as well as maintaining much more stable cluster structure, as compared to HCC(High Connectivity Clustering) algorithm