A survey on various cluster head election algorithms for MANET

In large Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET), forming clusters of nodes has been verified to be a promising approach in high mobility network. The characteristics of MANETs are dynamic topology, bandwidth and link capacity, nodes are energy constrained. Clustering methods allow fast connection and topology management, better routing and also improve network performance parameters like routing delay, bandwidth consumption and throughput. In MANET, topology changes dynamically, so to achieve good performance any clustering algorithm should operate with minimum overhead of cluster maintenance and try to preserve its structure as much as possible when nodes are moving and/or the topology is slowly changing. A large variety of approaches for ad hoc clustering have been developed by researchers which focuses on different performance metrics. This paper presents a survey of different clustering schemes. A comparative analysis of various techniques also have been covered in this paper.