Two phases based cluster formation scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc network, most of the cluster formation schemes consider host connectivity as a criterion for clusterhead election. However, since the highest connectivity hosts initiate the cluster formation and affiliate the neighbor hosts using a greedy method, the lowest connectivity hosts in network tend to become clusterheads. This phenomenon acts as an obstacle against producing a few clusters. In this paper, two phases based cluster formation scheme is proposed to resolve this problem. In the first phase, the lowest connectivity hosts in the neighborhood start the cluster formation, and an adjustment procedure is employed to affiliate the lowest connectivity hosts. In the second phase, the hosts not affiliated to the first phase clusters are grouped into one or more clusters based on host connectivity and host ID. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is better and more scalable than HCCP[3].