An Improved Weight-Based Clustering Algorithm in MANETs

Many applications of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) adopt hierarchical structure for the scalability and simplify of management. Clustering is the most popular method to impose a hierarchical structure in MANETs. As a newly- proposed weighing-based clustering algorithm, the weighted clustering algorithm (WCA) has improved performance compared with other previous clustering algorithms. But the high mobility of nodes will lead to high frequency of reaffiliations which will increase the network overhead. To solve this problem, we propose an improved weight-based clustering algorithm (IWCA) which can enhance the stability of the network by taking the relative mobility of node and its neighbors into consideration. Simulation study indicates that the proposed algorithm (IWCA) has improved performance with respect to the original WCA.