An efficient cluster management mechanism for MANETs

Mobile Ad Hoc network(MANET) is infrastructure-less, self-configurable and multi hop wireless network that has dynamic topology. Clustering in MANETs is a hierarchical aspect of dividing the network into various groups of nodes called Clusters, which leads to reduction in message overhead generated during topology maintenance. The proposed scheme provides efficient and improved cluster management mechanisms for MANETs, which includes efficient cluster formation and maintenance procedures. Proposed work aims to maintain stability of clusters with less number of cluster formation and minimum number of invocation of clustering algorithm. The proposed clustering algorithm will select efficient cluster head based on different performance metrics such as degree of the node, Bandwidth requirement of that node, SMR(session arrival rate to mobility ratio for each node) etc. Proposed architecture also eliminates the gateway node conception to avoid extra communication message overhead. The paper also includes advantages of our clustering scheme along with some of the existing approaches which form the basis for our algorithm in order to show the strength of this scheme over others.