Toward stable clustering in mobile ad hoc networks

This paper proposes a novel clustering scheme that aims to address the following concerns: effectiveness and low maintenance. By constructing a multi-hop clustering backbone with small number of cluster-heads, we successfully reduce the overhead of inter-cluster maintenance and backbone changes. Next, we utilize the cluster stretching mechanism which decreases the leaving frequency of cluster-members. As the number of leaving events is reduced, the cluster topology is more stable for high-layer applications. Finally, an extensive performance evaluation verifies our results under different system settings.