Adaptive Clustering Using Mobile Agents in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

A Mobile ad-hoc network is a multihop wireless network, where nodes communicate with each other without any pre-deployed infrastructure. The most important problem on such dynamic networks is to find routing algorithms well performing in most cases. Cluster based algorithms are among the most effective and scaleable approaches. Up till now creation and maintenance clusters were mostly based on basic heuristic methods. Deploying mobile agents has several advantages in the ad-hoc environment due to their flexible, robust and autonomous nature, and their use seems promising for the clustering problem as well. In our proposed architecture every cluster has a clustering agent that is capable of making membership modification decisions, transferring nodes and splitting or merging clusters. Communication is used only between neighbouring agents to reduce the signalling overhead. Clustering decisions can be based on several network parameters modified by an adaptation mechanism to provide adequate performance even under dynamic conditions.