A Distributed Size-bounded Multi-hop Clustering for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

During the last few years there has been a rapid development in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). To make the operations of a MANET more efficient, one approach is to construct and maintain a control structure. Clustering is such a natural approach to achieving local independent operations and control functions efficiently. In this paper we propose a weightbased distributed Size-bounded Multi-hop Clustering (SMC) approach for MANETs. In SMC, clusters are formed and maintained autonomously with only local information. The multi-hop nature and the employment of GroupJoin of SMC reduce the number of changes in case of mobility. SMC bounds cluster size to alleviate clusterheads’ workload. Simulation results show that in spite of mobility, SMC can achieve fewer consistent clusters with short communication paths between clusterheads and members and incurs fewer changes compared to other clustering methods, which is desirable for large scale MANETs.