Minimizing both the number of clusters and the variation of cluster sizes for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

The research of mobile ad hoc networks has attracted a lot of attentions recently. In particular, extensive research efforts have been devoted to the design of clustering strategies to divide all nodes into a clustering architecture such that the transmission overhead for the update of routing tables after topological changes can be reduced. The performance of a clustering architecture has been demonstrated to be closely related to the number of its clusters. In this paper, we will propose an efficient clustering algorithm to minimize the number of clusters and the variation of cluster sizes. Computer simulations show that both the number of clusters and the variation of cluster sizes generated by our clustering algorithm are less than those generated by other existing clustering algorithms that also aim to minimize the number of clusters. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.