Self-organizing Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Spontaneous Clustering at the MAC Layer

We present in this paper a master-slave, self-organized, spontaneous, passive, and dynamic clustering algorithm embedded into the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer for Mobile Ad hoc Networks. Any mobile station gets access to the channel by executing a contention-based mechanism similar to the IEEE 802.11 Standard. However, once it seizes the channel, it establishes a temporary cluster to which closer neighbors can get synchronized. Within each cluster, any infrastructure-based MAC protocol can be executed. Link-level computer simulations have been carried out to show that this approach can remarkably improve the performance of ad hoc networks at the MAC layer.