Cluster-Based Region Formation for Modeling MANET

The purpose of this paper is to address the self discovery of nodes and the dynamics of region formation in a highly mobile environment such as a theater during combat operation. This paper is focused on the building and maintaining of clusters and the method for gateway selection. The actual process of solicitation for subscription and configuration of hierarchical routing is treated briefly here. The Mobile Data Link (MDL) architecture, developed by Rockwell Collins [1], provides the channel access functionalities for Wideband Network Waveform (WNW). The clustering methods are developed to abstract two major components of the MDL model, namely, the Link Adaptation and the Neighbor monitoring modules to provide basis for hierarchical routing. Generally, clustering is an important step in the process of region formation for Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks. The concept of self-organizing for nodes binding into regions is presented based on two clustering algorithms, namely K-Means and Connectivity. Two algorithms are evaluated and compared using a large data set of 3000 nodes over 44 hours. Topology control based clusters-head or gateway selection algorithm was discussed along with hierarchical routing.