A stable clustering scheme by prediction of the staying time in a cluster for mobile Ad hoc networks

We propose a new clustering scheme for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), which can maintain a stable clustering structure by predicting the staying time for a cluster and selecting an optimal clusterhead (CH) which a node affiliates with. In the proposed scheme, when there are multiple CHs in the nodepsilas one hop neighbors at the initial clustering set-up or the nodepsilas movement to the outside of the transmission range of its CH, each node predicts the time when it would stay in the transmission range of a CH by using past position information of itself and the CH, and selects the CH with the maximum predicted staying time within neighbor CHs, and affiliates with the CH. Therefore, each node can stay in the same cluster for a long time. In addition, the proposed clustering scheme normalizes the system parameters which are used in the weight value calculation. The simulation results show that the proposed clustering scheme can reduce the average numbers of reaffiliations and control overheads compared with distributed weighted clustering algorithm (DWCA).