A Stability-Based Clustering Technique and Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks*

Clustering is an important technique in mobile ad hoc networks to provide a frame-work for management and reduce the overhead of route acquisition. Many clustering techniques had been proposed in the literature, but few of them had considered the status of network from the aspect of stability. In this paper, a stability-based clustering (SBC) technique is proposed. SBC only constructs stable enough clusters to reduced mainte-nance overhead. Therefore, SBC tends to construct more clusters in low-mobility situa-tions and fewer clusters in high-mobility situations. The route finding mechanism com-bining both unicasting and broadcasting of route request packets is proposed for SBC. Simulation study shows a better performance of SBC than Zone Routing Protocol, Low-est-ID Clustering, and Highest-Connectivity Clustering in terms of maintenance over-head and route finding cost