Power Aware Clustering Technique in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The concept of clustering has been proved to be very effective in managing the resources at the MAC level in a wireless multi hop network. In this paper we present a power aware clustering algorithm for mobile ad-hoc networks. The proposed algorithm takes into account, the transmission power, transmission rate, mobility, battery power, and the degree of a node for cluster head selection. The Lowest-ID algorithm finds the local minima of IDs and the Weighted Clustering Algorithm (WCA) finds the global minima of weights for selecting cluster heads. In contrast, the proposed power aware clustering algorithm finds only the local minima of weights for the clustering process. Through simulations, we investigated the performance of our algorithm with that of Lowest-ID and WCA in terms of the number of clusterhead changes, the number of reaffiliations, the control overhead and the throughput. The results have demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of energy consumption in the network.