A Fuzzy Approach for Secure Clustering in MANETs: Effects of Distance Parameter on System Performance

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a multihop wireless network in which the mobile nodes are dynamic in nature and has a limited bandwidth and minimum battery power. Due to this challenging environment the mobile nodes can be grouped into clusters to achieve better stability and scalability. Grouping the mobile nodes is called clustering, in which a leader node is elected to manage the entire network. In this paper, first we introduce various approaches for clustering focused on different performance metrics. Then, we show some clustering schemes such as Mobility-based clustering, Energy-efficient clustering, Connectivity-based clustering, Weighted-based clustering. Finally, we present and compare two Fuzzy based systems (called F2SMC1 and F2SMC2) for improving the security of cluster nodes in MANETs. We compare the performance of F2SMC1 and F2SMC2 and show that the F2SMC2 is more complex than F2SMC1, but the F2SMC2 can manage the nodes in the cluster better than F2SMC1.