Author : Zeba Khanam, Prateek Singh and Neha Rani

Communication in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) without having any fixed infrastructure has drawn much attention for research. The infrastructure based cellular architecture sets up base stations to support the node mobility. Thus, mapping the concepts of base stations into MANET could meet its challenges like limited battery power, scalability, available band width etc.. This leads to the design of logical clusters, where the cluster heads in every cluster play the role of base station. The cluster heads also form the virtual back bone for routing the packets in the network. In our proposed research, simulation based survey has been made to study the strengths and weaknesses of existing algorithms that motivated for the design of energy efficient clustering in MANET. As the current head consumes its battery power beyond a threshold, non-volunteer cluster heads are selected locally. The algorithm we will propose shall aims to utilize the battery power in a fairly distributed manner so that the total network life time is enhanced with reduced cluster maintenance overhead. Therefore a new weight based clustering algorithm is developed using the remains energy, signal to noise ratio, mobility and connectivity for better performance in a cluster. The implementation and the comparative performance study are performed in network simulator 2 platforms. The performance studies of the technique are given in terms of packet delivery ratio, remaining energy, end to end delay, throughput and overhead in network. The obtained results demonstrate the proposed technique improves the reliability of cluster.

Keywords: MANET, Base station, Cluster head, Non-volunteer cluster head, Cluster maintenance overhead.

Article published in International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.5, No.4 (Aug-2015)