Dynamic Local Clustering for Hierarchical Ad Hoc Networks

Hierarchical, cluster-based routing greatly reduces routing table sizes compared to host-based routing, while reducing path efficiency by at most a constant factor [9]. More importantly, the amount of routing related signalling traffic is reduced [7, 11, 19]. On the other hand, address changes caused by nodes changing their cluster produces address management traffic. In this paper, we present a new local clustering method that produces dense and stable clusters, thereby minimizing address changes and allowing better and more stable network conditions for ad hoc routing.