A novel weight based clustering algorithm for routing in MANET

Cluster based routing in Mobile AdHoc Networks are considered one of the convenient method of routing. Existence of Cluster Head (CH) in a group of nodes for data forwarding improves the performance of routing in terms of routing overhead and power consumption. However, due to the movement of CH and frequent change in cluster members, cluster reformation is required and increases cluster formation overhead. The stability of the cluster highly dependent of stability of the CH and hence during CH selection special care should be taken so that the cluster head survives for longer time. In this paper a method of cluster formation is proposed which will take into account two most vital factor node degree and bandwidth requirement for construction of the cluster and selection of the cluster head. Further, when two clusters come closer to each other they merge and form a single cluster. In such case out of two CHs one has to withdraw the role and other will take over. A new mechanism of merging two clusters is also proposed in the paper. We call this method as an Improved Cluster Maintenance Scheme and primarily focused on minimizing CH changing process in order to enhance the performance. The stated method makes cluster more stable, and minimizes packet loss. The proposed algorithm is simulated in ns-2 and compared with Least Cluster head Change (LCC) and CBRP. Our algorithm shows better behavior in terms of number of clusterhead changes or number of cluster member changes.