A novel distributed cluster maintenance technique for high mobility ad-hoc networks

The dynamic nature of the mobile nodes in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET), causes the mobile nodes to join and leave the clusters, thereby perturbing the membership of the clusters. Therefore cluster maintenance schemes are required to handle new admissions and releases of nodes in the clusters. Maintaining clusters in a distributed manner is more preferred in ad-hoc networks since it does not result in single point bottleneck failure. In a resource-limited network such as MANET (especially with nodes of varied capability), it is worthwhile to control the number of nodes per cluster for good planning and management of resources (such as memory, link bandwidth, battery power etc) in the cluster. In this paper, we propose a distributed cluster maintenance strategy that limits the number of nodes inside a cluster. However, we elect a cluster head for communication across the clusters. Our algorithm yields low number of clusters when compared to other algorithms taken for study. It is also observed that the number of cluster head changes is less and the life time of the cluster head is more. This behaviour of the cluster head is favourable to the high mobility environments because frequent updation of cluster head information and frequent re-election of cluster head may not be necessary.