A novel k-hop Compound Metric Based Clustering scheme for ad hoc wireless networks

This paper presents a novel k-hop compound metric based clustering (KCMBC) scheme, which uses the host connectivity and host mobility jointly to select cluster-heads. KCMBC is a fast convergent and load balancing clustering approach that is able to offer significant improvement on scalability for large-scale ad hoc networks. On the other hand, since host mobility has been taken into account in terms of the average link expiration time, the clusters constructed by KCMBC are more stable than many other schemes. Simulation results show that the clusters created by using the KCMBC approach retain modest but more uniform cluster size, and cluster-head life-time can be increased by KCMBC up to 50%. Moreover, the control overheads for cluster formation using the KCMBC scheme are kept relatively low if compared to other clustering schemes.