Adaptive cluster-based approach for reducing routing overheads in MANETs

Despite the substantial work done on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), the scalability of routing protocols remains a limiting factor in large-scale deployments. An inherent problem lies in the route discovery mechanism of routing protocols, most of which rely on some form of flooding to search for routes and disseminate topology information. Clustering has been identified as one of the approaches to improve routing protocols' scalability and can prove to be useful provided the additional overheads incurred by the clustering management do not negate the gains in the reduction of routing overheads. In this paper, we present an extension of a typical MANET routing protocol that integrates an adaptive clustering mechanism and show that it is able to significantly reduce the communications overheads of routing protocols, thus paving the way for greater scalability.