Layerless Design of A Power-efficient Clustering Algorithm for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks under Fading

Traditional wireless ad hoc network power-efficient design proceeds separately on access and clustering algorithms by assuming perfect distance (that is, no fading and channel impairments) at most. In this paper, we discard the traditional layer-concept to tackle this important power-efficient wireless ad hoc networks under shadow fading, by identifying distance between a node pair as a sort of random distance to accommodate fading effect, which of course can be considered as a cross-layer design from traditional concept. By deriving the probability distribution of the distance between two nodes and the probability distribution of the distances between nodes and a randomly selected common reference node, the impacts of shadow fading on the link connectivity and node degree of the randomly constructed network topology are studied. Next, we propose a critical node first (CNF) based clustering algorithm to organize such a shadow faded random network topology into a power-efficient network architecture. By taking the shadow fading effects into considerations, our results show that the cluster-based network architecture generated by the proposed CNF-based clustering algorithm is power-efficient since the required number of exchanges of the cluster maintenance overheads is reduced.