Journals Proceedings

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) allow mobile nodes to communicate without a need for a fixed infrastructure. Nodes within MANETs move about arbitrarily, dynamically changing their connectivity and possibly partitioning the network. In this paper, we consider weight-based clustering as a viable approach to alleviate these issues. However, many of the existing weight-based clustering algorithms suffer from a high re-clustering rate resulting in the production of relatively unstable clusters. Therefore, we propose a 2-hop weight-based clustering algorithm, RPMW in the view that it will minimize the re-clustering rate of the network and thus preserve its lifetime. RPMW takes into consideration the weight factors of PMW along with the node degree in calculating the weight of a node. We provide a comparative analysis of these two algorithms in which RMPW is shown to outperform PMW in cluster stability thus maximizing the lifespan of clusters.