Survey of Stable Clustering for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Clustering is an important research topic for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) because clustering makes it possible to guarantee basic levels of system performance, such as throughput and delay, in the presence of both mobility and a large number of mobile terminals. A large variety of approaches for ad hoc clustering have been presented, whereby different approaches typically focus on different performance metrics. In mobile ad hoc networks, the movement of the network nodes may quickly change the topology resulting in the increase of the overhead message in topology maintenance; the clustering schemes for mobile ad hoc networks therefore aim at handling topology maintenance, managing node movement or reducing overhead. This paper presents the reasons for clustering algorithms in ad hoc networks, as well as a short survey of the basic ideas and priorities of existing clustering algorithms.