Clustering overhead and convergence time analysis of the mobility-based multi-hop clustering algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks

With the emergence of large mobile ad hoc networks, the ability of existing routing protocols to scale well and function satisfactorily comes into question. Clustering has been proposed as a means to divide large networks into groups of suitably smaller sizes such that prevailing MANET routing protocols can be applied. However, the benefits of clustering come at a cost. Clusters take time to form and the clustering algorithms also introduce additional control messages that contend with data traffic for the wireless bandwidth. In this paper, we aim to analyse a distributed multi-hop clustering algorithm, Mobility-based D-Hop (MobDHop), based on two key clustering performance metrics and compare it with other popular clustering algorithms used in MANETs. We show that the overhead incurred by multi-hop clustering has a similar asymptotic bound as 1-hop clustering while being able to reap the benefits of multi-hop clusters. Simulation results are presented to verify our analysis. (C) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.