A Low Control Overhead Cluster Maintenance Scheme for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs)

Clustering is an important research area for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) as it increases the capacity of network, reduces the routing overhead and makes the network more scalable in the presence of both high mobility and a large number of mobile nodes. In clustering the clusterhead manage and store recent routing information. However the frequent change of clusterhead leads to loss of routing information stored, changes the route between two nodes, affects the performance of the routing protocol and makes the cluster structure unstable. Communication overhead in terms of exchanging messages is needed to elect a new clusterhead. The goal then would be to keep the clusterhead change as least as possible to make cluster structure more stable, to prevent loss of routing information which in turn improve the performance of routing protocol based on clustering. This can be achieved by an efficient cluster maintenance scheme. In this work, a novel clustering algorithm, namely Incremental Maintenance Clustering Scheme (IMS) is proposed for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. The goals are yielding low number of clusterhead and clustermember changes, maintaining stable clusters, minimizing the number of clustering overhead. Through simulations the performance of IMS is compared with that of least cluster change (LCC) and maintenance scheme of Cluster Based Routing Protocol (CBRP) in terms of the number of clusterhead changes, number of cluster-member changes and clustering overhead by varying mobility and speed. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of IMS over LCC and maintenance scheme of CBRP.