AN IMPROVED CLUSTER BASED ROUTING PROTOCOL WITH BACKUP CLUSTER HEAD FOR MANETS

ABSTRACT Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a reconfigurable network of mobile nodes connected by multi-hop wireless links and capable of operating without any fixed infrastructure support. In order to facilitate communication within such self-creating, self-organizing and self-administrating network, a dynamic routing protocol is needed. The routing protocol performance suffers due to resource constraints and mobility of the nodes. The existing routing challenges in MANETs clustering based protocols suffer frequently with cluster head failure problem, which reduces the cluster stability. This paper proposes, Improved CBRP, a method to develop the cluster stability and in-turn enhances the performance of traditional cluster based routing protocol (CBRP), by electing better cluster head using weighted clustering algorithm and considering some vital routing challenges. Also, proposed protocol suggests a backup cluster head for each cluster, to increase the stability of the cluster in case of unexpected failure of cluster head. Keywords: CBRP, MANETs, cluster head, WCA, backup cluster. INTRODUCTION Mobile ad-hoc networks (hereinafter, MANETs) are infrastructure less self-organizing networks, formed randomly by mobile hosts using wireless links, and the union of which forms a communication network. Routing protocol offers communication outside the physical wireless range of nodes by relaying on intermediary nodes Clustering is one approach to reduce traffic during the routing process, and several authors proposed cluster based routing protocols Node starts timer and broadcasts HELLO packet. If it receives a Hello reply from any cluster head then sets it state as cluster member else it makes itself as cluster head but only when it has bidirectional links with one or more neighbor nodes. Otherwise it repeats the procedure with sending HELLO packets. Clustering is the process that divides the network into interconnected substructures, called clusters. Each cluster has a cluster head and act as a coordinator within the substructure. Each cluster head, in other terms acts as