Evaluating the Efficiency of Clustering on Routing and Network Performance

The intrinsic characteristics of ad hoc networks, such as the frequent connectivity changes and the strict bandwidth and power constraints, impose further challenges, especially for routing tasks. Establishing and maintaining routes are hard tasks in a dynamic environment, in particular for large and dense networks where the control overhead induced by routing packets increases with the number of nodes. To overcome the scalability problem, creating hierarchies among the nodes seems a promising venue and an effective approach to organize the network as the number of nodes increases. In this paper, we investigate the influence of the underlying clustering algorithm on the quality of the routing and illustrate through conducted simulations the gain in network total throughput that can be attained using a clustering scheme that does not rely on periodic exchange of neighborhood information.