A Flexible Weight Based Clustering Algorithm in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Clustering has been proven to be a promising approach for mimicking the operation of the fixed infrastructure and managing the resources in multi-hop networks. In order to achieve good performance, the formation and maintenance procedure of clusters should operate with minimum overhead, allowing mobile nodes to join and leave without perturbing the membership of the cluster and preserving current cluster structure as much as possible. In this paper, we propose a Flexible Weight Based Clustering Algorithm (FWCA) in Mobile Ad hoc Networks. The goals are yielding low number of clusters, maintaining stable clusters, minimizing the number of invocations for the algorithm and maximizing lifetime of mobile nodes in the system. Through simulations we have compared the performance of our algorithm with that of WCA in terms of the number of clusters formed, number of re-affiliations, number of states transitions on each clusterhead and number of clusterheads changes. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm.