A Stable Clustering Algorithm Based on Battery Power for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Recently, extensive research efforts have been devoted to the design of clustering algorithms to organize all the hosts in a mobile ad hoc network into a clustering architecture. However, due to the dynamic nature of the mobile hosts, their association with and dissociation from clusters disturb the stability of the network, making reconfiguration of cluster heads unavoidable. Re-computation of cluster heads and frequent information exchange among the participating hosts will suffer high computation overheads. Therefore, it is obvious that a more stable clustering architecture will directly lead to the performance improvement of the whole network. In this paper, we will propose an efficient clustering algorithm that can establish a stable clustering architecture by keeping a host with weak battery power from being elected as a cluster head. Computer simulations show that the clustering architectures generated by our clustering algorithm are more stable than those generated by other clustering algorithms.