Exploiting a clustering mechanism for power saving in ad hoc networks: Performance evaluation

Designing power aware protocols becomes a pre-requisite to conserve energy and extend network life time. In fact, many target applications may require such features when being deployed for long periods in hostile environments, such as rescue or military operations. To assure power saving while preserving network capacity, relaying on a virtual backbone seems a promising approach. Through keeping a subset of nodes active for communication tasks, we allow other nodes to switch to sleep mode reducing consequently energy waste. However, the benefits of clustering come at a cost in terms of time and the prohibitive overhead incurred during the clusters´ establishment and maintenance. In this paper, we investigate the influence of the underlying clustering algorithm on the performance of a power saving mechanism. The conducted simulations confirm the importance given to the choice of an efficient clustering algorithm to achieve energy efficiency while preserving network capacity.