Hybrid Self-Organization based Cluster Management Scheme for Group Mobility Aware MANET

The dynamic changes in cluster topology of Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) can cause cluster management issues. Cluster management in the presence of mobility and cluster load balancing are among the most difficult issues to handle in mobility aware MANET. In this paper, we propose a self-organization based hybrid scheme for cluster management. This scheme is inspired from the behavioral study of firefly and dragonfly. Hybrid scheme consists of different phases which ensure cluster formation and its management. The cluster formation takes place by using energy aware approach of firefly algorithm while cluster management takes place using behavioral study of both dragonfly and firefly. A cluster merging technique is proposed for refining number of clusters in MANET to achieve cluster load balancing. The performance of proposed hybrid scheme is evaluated and compared with the existing scheme by considering the benchmarks of energy consumption, cluster head advertisement messages and topology distribution with respect to hop count.