A Self-Organizing Approach to MANET Clustering

Clustering has evolved as an important research topic in MANETs as it improves the system performance of large MANETs. As MANETS have a limitation of battery power, cluster formation is expensive in terms of power depletion of nodes. This is due to the large number of messages passed during the process of cluster formation. In this paper, we use the self-organizing principles for binding a node to a cluster. We minimize the explicit message passing in cluster formation. We also used the route message of a proactive routing protocol for keeping track of nodes in cluster. Thus, there is no need for explicit message passing during cluster maintenance. Unlike most conventional methods a cluster head in our method acts only as an identifying label for cluster entity. It does not perform any hierarchical routing or cluster maintenance function and hence is not a bottleneck to the functioning of the cluster. Our scheme also involves low latency in the cluster formation phase. In addition, we choose the cluster gateway during cluster formation avoiding the need to explicitly discover the gateways, thus reducing further the transmission overheads.

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