A Survey of Cluster Management Techniques in MANETs

Mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET) is infrastructure-less, self-configurable and multi hop wireless network that has dynamic topology. Clustering in MANETs is a hierarchical aspect of dividing the network into various groups of nodes called Clusters. Many clustering schemes have been proposed for adhoc networks. A systematic classification of these clustering schemes enables one to better understand and make improvements. In mobile ad hoc networks, the movement of the network nodes may quickly change the topology of network resulting in the increase of the message overhead in topology maintenance. A variety of approaches for MANET clustering has been developed and proposed by researchers which focus on different performance metrics. This paper includes basic clustering definition, challenges and issues, various existing clustering approaches and their detailed critical analysis based on its advantagesdisadvantages, features and their performance metrics. With this survey, researcher can have a more thorough and detailed understanding of ad hoc clustering and the research trends in this area. Keywords—Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET), Clustering.