Design Issues and Performance Analysis of Location-Aided Hierarchical Cluster Routing on the MANET

MANET (mobile ad-hoc network) is a type of dynamic configuration wireless ad-hoc network that does not require the basic Internet construction. Clustering of devices in MANET could reduce overhead, flooding and collision in communication and make the network topology more stable. Cluster Heads (CHs) are determined dynamically and in charge of the routing of the cluster. Frequent search of CH nodes would lower the efficiency of network. Many clustering algorithms used in searching CH nodes only consider the hop counts. However, the hop numbers do not demonstrate the exact distance between two CH nodes. Therefore, the location aided hierarchical cluster routing (LHCR), a more suitable way for mobile ad-hoc network routing is proposed. The LHCR method arranges the nodes in the networks into hierarchical clusters by the amount and position of the data. Thereby, it avoids the nodes that are far away from each other being assigned to the same cluster, and at the same time taking the CH nodes´ power amount into consideration to avoid over-transformation. Routing is taken care of by the highest level of the nodes in each cluster. Simulation results indicate that the LHCR is more efficient and effective than ZRP and AODV in larger networks.