A Survey on Clustering based Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In current trends without preexisting infrastructures, Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are a specific kind of wireless sensor networks which are quickly adopted. Collaborative, medical, military or embedded applications are some of the different types used here. Large number of nodes is used at the large scale of network when MANETs provides new challenges where many clustering algorithms are mitigated. Clusters are the group of entities which allow the clustering algorithm for structuring of network creates a hierarchical structure. Identity, mobility, degree, density, weight, etc., are some of the specific or combination of metrics where each cluster contains a particular node called cluster head. The characteristics of the transmission medium are sharing, low bandwidth, and the routing protocols (information diffusion, path finding, etc.) are the two drawbacks for MANETs. Resource management and net-work performance (routing delay, bandwidth consumption and throughput) are improved to play a vital role for clustering in mobile ad hoc networks. Identifier Neighbor based clustering, Energy based clustering, Mobility based clustering, Topology based clustering, and Weight based clustering are studied and analyzed for existing clustering approaches of MANETs in this article. Then the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques include clustering definition with the clustering approach based on the observation.