Load-Balancing Technique in Clustered Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Network is a collection of mobile nodes without the assistance of any centralized structures. The network is divided into clusters, each cluster has a clusterhead, which is used to distribute service and route packets in his cluster. Due to the variance between the node´s levels of activity, the network may possess either highly loaded or lightly loaded clusterheads. This may degrade the performance, because the service distribution and routing mechanism are both based on the cluster´s architecture. Therefore, we propose a new technique to distribute the load between the clusterheads, which is called Clusterhead Load-Balancing Technique (CLBT). When loaded and unloaded clusterheads are present, CLBT will be invoked to initiate load-balancing between clusterheads by adapting the clusterheads´ transmission range to fairly redistribute their respective nodes. Loaded clusterhead reduces its transmission range until it dismisses the active nodes from its cluster, simultaneously, unloaded clusterhead gradually raises its transmission range to include active nodes.