Adaptive k-means clustering for Flying Ad-hoc Networks

Flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) is a vibrant research area nowadays. This type of network ranges from various military and civilian applications. FANET is formed by micro and macro UAVs. Among many other problems, there are two main issues in FANET. Limited energy and high mobility of FANET nodes effect the flight time and routing directly. Clustering is a remedy to handle these types of problems. In this paper, an efficient clustering technique is proposed to handle routing and energy problems. Transmission range of FANET nodes is dynamically tuned accordingly as per their operational requirement. By optimizing the transmission range packet loss ratio (PLR) is minimized and link quality is improved which leads towards reduced energy consumption. To elect optimal cluster heads (CHs) based on their fitness we use k-means. Selection of optimal CHs reduce the routing overhead and improves energy consumption. Our proposed scheme outclasses the existing state-of-the-art techniques, ACO based CACONET and PSO based CLPSO, in terms of energy consumption and cluster building time.