Clustering Heuristics in Wireless Networks: A Survey

The subject of wireless networks has recently gained a lot of attention from research community to investigate. The well-organized subdivision of a wireless network into coherent, mostly non-overlapping clusters of physically close nodes is a significant building block in the design of well-organized upper layer network functions such as energy saving, routing, stability, coverage and data aggregation. In our paper, we present a snapshot of different clustering techniques for wireless networks. We also present comparative analysis of different clustering mechanisms based on metrics such as load balancing, efficiency of coverage, energyawareness, cluster stability, routing overhead control, dynamic changes of topology and locality.