An On-Demand Clustering Mechanism for Hierarchical Routing Protocol in Ad Hoc Networks

Clustering is widely used in ad hoc networks. The most important function of clustering is to provide management of large networks and assign the channel effectively. To maintain the hierarchical topology, the existing clustering mechanisms bring a lot of communication due to movement of the mobility and disappearance of nodes in the network, so there is vast control overhead. To avoid the problem, an on-demand clustering routing protocol (OCRP) is proposed. It eliminates the phase for clustering, and merges this phase with data transmission phase. OCRP adds a field for every data packet to identify five clustering states. Each node analyzes the clustering state field in the received packets, and decides how to switch its own clustering state