Stable Clustering with Efficient Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In ad hoc networks the association and disassociation of mobile nodes to and from the clusters perturb the stability of the network and thus reconfiguration of clusterheads is unavoidable. This is an important issue since the frequent clusterhead changes adversely affect the performance of other protocols. This paper proposes a weight based adaptive clustering algorithm (WBACA) that leads to a high degree of stability in the network. The proposed WBACA takes into account the transmission power, transmission rate, mobility, battery power and the degree of a node for forming clusters. Through simulations we have compared the performance of WBACA with that of the lowest-ID algorithm and the weighted clustering algorithm (WCA) in terms of the number of clusters formed, number of clusterhead changes, and the number of reaffiliations. We also study the operation and performance of the proposed scheme through detailed simulations, evaluating the control overheads, throughput, and average packet transfer delay in the network.