A balanced 1-hop clustering scheme for Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), without any fixed infrastructures, allow mobile terminals to setup a temporary network for instant communication. Hence, MANETs promise to have many applications including disaster management, emergency relief, mobile conferencing, battle field communication, and so on. Clustering is an important approach in ad hoc networks for achieving scalability, ease of routing, basic performance guarantee such as throughput and delay, in the presence of large number of mobile nodes and high mobility. Connectivity among cluster heads is required for most applications such as message broadcasting, data communication, routing synchronization in distributed computing environment among many others. A number of 1-hop clustering protocols have been proposed, essentially based on the notion of Connected Dominating Set (CDS) for better connectivity. Conventional 1-hop clustering algorithms assume an existing MANET having some nodes and implement their algorithms on that network. Unlike those algorithms, we propose a new 1-hop clustering algorithm which forms the clusters at boot time of each node without any assumption of a MANET existing or already working. Our algorithm focuses on load balanced clusters and minimizing message exchanges in cluster formation. We tested our proposed scheme using ns 2.29 simulator.