Clustering of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: An Adaptive Broadcast Period Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents an adaptive clustering algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks that improves stability, manageability, and energy efficiency by adjusting broadcast periods based on node mobility, reducing control message overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed clustering method using location and energy metrics with adaptive broadcast periods to enhance network performance.

Findings

Demonstrated improved stability and energy efficiency through simulations.

Reduced control message overhead compared to existing methods.

Showed scalability and effectiveness in various mobility scenarios.

Abstract

Organization, scalability and routing have been identified as key problems hindering viability and commercial success of mobile ad hoc networks. Clustering of mobile nodes among separate domains has been proposed as an efficient approach to address those issues. In this work, we introduce an efficient distributed clustering algorithm that uses both location and energy metrics for cluster formation. Our proposed solution mainly addresses cluster stability, manageability and energy efficiency issues. Also, unlike existing active clustering methods, our algorithm relieves the network from the unnecessary burden of control messages broadcasting, especially for relatively static network topologies. This is achieved through adapting broadcast period according to mobile nodes mobility pattern. The efficiency, scalability and competence of our algorithm against alternative approaches have been demonstrated through simulation results.