A unifying look at clustering in mobile ad hoc networks

In recent years, a significant number of clustering schemes have been proposed in the literature. Most of them treat cluster initialization and cluster maintenance differently as if they were two entirely different undertakings. The main contribution of this work is a unifying way of looking at clustering in MANET. We make an important point: there is no difference between cluster initialization and cluster maintenance, and one algorithm should gracefully blend into the other. To illustrate the feasibility of this concept, we propose a novel tree-based clustering, algorithm for MANET based on a number of properties of diameter-2 graphs. The algorithm is cluster-centric and, unlike the vast majority of algorithms in the literature, works in the presence of node mobility. Extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of our algorithm when compared to other clustering schemes proposed in the recent literature. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.