An Efficient Clustering in MANETs with Minimum Communication and Reclustering Overhead

Abstract

A flat structure in MANETs based on proactive or reactive routing schemes face scalability problems with increase in both mobility and network size. Clustering offers hierarchical organization of mobile nodes by forming disjoint groups (clusters). So clustering techniques solve the scalability issue in large MANETs but, requires extra message exchange among mobile nodes for maintenance of cluster structure. Due to mobility in MANETs stability of cluster structure is greatly affected as such it often leads to Ripple effect of reclustering. In this paper, the authors present clustering algorithm that eliminates the requirement of frozen period and minimizes reclustering of entire network by locally repairing cluster structure that gets affected due to moment of head node. They have reduced the number of messages exchanged in their proposed work by including different range of transmission for each node and overall stability of entire structure is enhanced.