A ZONAL ALGORITHM FOR CLUSTERING AN HOC NETWORKS

Abstract

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is an infrastructureless wireless network that can support highly dynamic mobile units. The multi-hop feature of a MANET suggests the use of clustering to simplify routing. Graph domination can be used in defining clusters in MANETs. A variant of dominating set which is more suitable for clustering MANETs is the weakly-connected dominating set. A cluster is defined to be the set of vertices dominated by a particular vertex in the dominating set. As it is NP-complete to determine whether a given graph has a weakly-connected dominating set of a particular size, we present a zonal distributed algorithm for finding small weakly-connected dominating sets. In this new approach, we divide the graph into regions, construct a weakly-connected dominating set for each region, and make adjustments along the borders of the regions to produce a weakly-connected dominating set of the entire graph. We present experimental evidence that this zonal algorithm has similar performance to and provides better cluster connectivity than previous algorithms.