Congestion adaptive load balanced clustering scheme for prolonging network lifetime in mobile ad-hoc network

Abstract

Clustering in Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is the most effective technique to improve scalability and network lifetime. However, congestion and load balancing are still a major concern for optimising energy consumption and packet loss. Most of the existing routing protocols for MANET provide a solution for congestion control or load balancing among cluster heads separately. In this paper, a congestion adaptive load balanced clustering scheme is proposed where we are emphasising not only on the problem of appropriate cluster head selection, but also on assigning mobile nodes to cluster heads efficiently, based on the congestion status of cluster heads. Thus, our proposed algorithm revolves around three benefactions for load balanced clustering with congestion control, i.e. the selection of most suitable nodes to serve as cluster heads, minimising the overall loads to cluster heads and congestion control, which improve network lifetime with minimal overhead. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed clustering algorithm compared with the existing algorithms in terms of average number of clusters formed, average end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, average number of re-clustering required and network lifetime.