A distributed algorithm for traffic aware clustering in ad hoc networks

Clustering is used commonly in ad hoc networks for hierarchical routing. Size-bounded clustering has been proposed to restrict the maximum size of a cluster so that the routing load, and hence the energy drain, on the clusterhead is bounded. However, all the existing size-bounded clustering algorithms take the size bound as the number of nodes in the cluster. This approach may still result in high routing load on a clusterhead if the traffic rate of the nodes in the cluster is high. In this paper, we propose a simple metric based on average traffic rates of nodes for size-bounded clustering that reflects the actual routing load on a clusterhead. We present a distributed clustering algorithm that bounds the cluster size in terms of this metric, and also reduces the total energy spent in sending all the packets. Detailed simulation results are presented to show that the protocol performs significantly better than some other size-bounded clustering schemes.