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An Efficient Weight-Based Clustering

Algorithm for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks
Mohammad Reza Monsef, Sam Jabbehdari and Farshad Safaei

Abstract— Many clustering algorithms have been proposed to partition mobile devices into clusters to support routing and
network management. In this paper, we proposed an efficient weight-based clustering algorithm (EWBCA) for mobile ad hoc
networks (MANETs). It aimes to improve the usage of scarce resources such as bandwidth and energy, preserve current cluster
structure as much as possible, minimize routing overhead, and increase end-to-end throughput. In our algorithm, each node has
a quality that indicates its suitability as a cluster head. This quality is calculated according to following four parameters: Number
of Neighbors, Residual Power of Battery, Stability and Variance of distance with all neighbors. Through simulations, we
compared our proposed algorithm with WCA algorithm in terms of the number of clusters, number of re-affiliations, routing
overhead, end-to-end throughput and average consumed energy in various number of nodes. The simulation results showed
that the proposed algorithm has superior performance than WCA.

Index Terms— MANET, Routing, Clustering, Performance.

——————————  ——————————

1 INTRODUCTION

A D HOC networks consist of a number of mobile

devices that dynamically form wireless network
without any preexisting communication infrastruc-
ture [1], [2]. In such network, mobile nodes communicate
with each other using multi-hop wireless links.
Each mobile node operates not only as a host but also
as a router, forwarding packets for other mobile nodes in
the network that may not be within direct wireless trans-
mission range of each other.
Routing algorithms for ad hoc networks are responsi-
ble to establish low-cost and high quality route in rather
dynamic environments. Indeed, the clustering algorithm
can improve the performance of routing algorithms [3]
with the reduction of routing overhead and resources
optimization such as battery power, network capacity
and bandwidth. This algorithm consists in dividing the
network into groups of interconnected nodes that named
clusters.
A major challenge in the design of ad hoc networks is
the development of clustering algorithms that can estab-
lish stable clusters where cluster head reelection is re-
duced and cluster membership periods are increased in
these networks.
In this paper, we proposed a new Clustering algorithm
for MANET called Efficient Weight-Based Clustering Al-
gorithm (EWBCA). It uses clustering's structure to de-
crease routing overhead and save the node’s energy.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: In
section 2, we present an overview of previous clustering
————————————————
 Mohammad Reza Monsef is with the the Computer Engineering Depart-
ment, North Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
 Sam Jabbehdari. is with the the Computer Engineering Department,
North Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
 Farshad Safaei is with the the Computer Engineering Department, Shahid
Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
algorithms. Section 3 gives a description of proposed clus-
tering setup and maintenance phases. Then the modifica-
tion of route discovery procedure and maintenance
process in underlying routing protocol is discussed in
section 4. The details of Simulation experiments of the
proposed algorithm and their results are depicted in sec-
tion 5. Finally section 6 concludes the paper.
2 RELATED WORKS
Many clustering algorithms have been proposed in the
past which include the Highest-Degree [4], the Lowest-
Identifier [5] [6], Distributed Clustering Algorithm [7], the
Weighted Clustering Algorithm (WCA) [8], Distributed
Weighted Clustering Algorithm (DWCA) [9].
The Highest-Degree algorithm uses the number of
neighbors of a node as a metric for the selection of cluster
heads. The node with maximum degree is chosen as a
cluster head. Basically, each node either becomes a cluster
head or remains an ordinary node (neighbor of a cluster
head).The reaffiliation count of nodes is being high due to
node movements.
The Lowest-Identifier algorithm which assigns a
unique identifier (ID) to each node, chooses the node with
the minimum ID as a cluster head. The system perfor-
mance is better than Highest-Degree heuristic in terms of
throughput.
The Distributed Clustering Algorithm is a modified
version of the Lowest-Identifier algorithm. For each clus-
ter, it chooses a node with locally lowest ID among all the
neighbor nodes as a cluster head. Every node can deter-
mine its cluster and only one cluster, and transmits only
one message during the algorithm [10].Since it uses node
ID for the selection of cluster heads, it inherits the draw-
backs of the Lowest-Identifier heuristic.
The WCA is based on the use of a combined weight
metric that takes into account several system parameters
like the node-degree, distances with all its neighbors,
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node speed and the time spent as a cluster head.
The distributed weighted clustering (DWCA) algo-
rithm is based on the weight values considering optimal
cluster size, distance between a cluster head and ordinary
nodes, node mobility, and battery power consumption.
The DWCA chooses the cluster heads using the informa-
tion of neighbor nodes, and maintains clusters locally.
3 PROPOSED CLUSTERING ALGORITHM
Clustering is a process that divides the network into
interconnected substructures, called clusters. Each
cluster has a cluster head as coordinator within the
substructure. Each cluster head acts as a temporary
base station within its zone or cluster and commu-
nicates with other cluster heads.
In our algorithm, there are four possible states for the
node: NUL, CLUSTERHEAD, MEMBER and GATEWAY.
Initially all nodes are in the state of NUL. The ordinary
nodes that join a cluster, are called MEMBER nodes. The
nodes which receive messages from more than one cluster
head which are located in its neighborhood region, are
GATEWAY nodes. CLUSTERHEAD is the node which is
responsible for formation of cluster and its members and
has information of all its member nodes within its cluster.
Each node maintains the neighbor table wherein the
information about the other neighbor nodes is stored.
Initially we describe the clustering set up and clustering
maintenance phases.
3.1 Clustering Setup Phase
Various parameters are considered for cluster heads elec-
tion. In our algorithm, theses parameters are Number of
neighbor nodes, Residual battery power, Stability of
node, Variance of distance with all neighbors of a node.
Each node calculates its weight value with attaining the
values of above parameters and putting them into Equa-
tion (1).
And then each node broadcasts its weight to all the nodes
which are in its neighborhood region. Finally, the node
with highest weight is chosen as the cluster head.
(1)
Where C1 , C2 , C3 , C4 are weighting factors for the cor-
responding system parameters listed below:
- Number of Neighbor Nodes (Nn): The Number of exist-
ing nodes which are located in the transmission range.
- Residual Power of Battery (Rb): the remaining energy of
a node.
- Stability (St): The average of link expiration times (Let)
[11] between a specific node with all its neighbors.
∑ , (2)
, duces itself as a cluster head.
17
(3)
cos cos (4)
(5)
sin sin (6)
(7)
Where nodes i,j are two mobile nodes that have a trans-
mission range of r, speeds vi and vj , directions and θ
, coordinates (xi , yi) and (xj , yj). N(i) is the set of node’s
neighbors and N is the number of members of this set.
‐ Variance of distance (Vd): Variance of distance between
node i and its neighbors indicates how the nodes are dis-
tributed around its mean of distance µ(i) (8). However the
values of the average and variance of distance are small-
er, stability degree of the cluster is longer.
∑ , (8)
∑ , (9)
Where dis(i,j) is distance value between i and j.
Our proposed protocol has 6 main steps (in each node):
Step1 The node i finds its neighbors by receiving Hello
messages from them and updates its neighborhood table.
Step2 The node i calculates its combined weight Wi and
broadcasts it to all its neighbors by sending a
Weight_EWBCA message.
Step3 The node i compares the received weights of all its
1-hop neighbors with its own weight and chooses the
node with the highest weight as its cluster head. Thus
each node either declares itself as cluster head and broad-
casts a Be_CH_ EWBCA message to all 1-hop neighbors
or chooses another node as cluster head and waits to re-
ceive a Be_CH_EWBCA message from it.
Step4 Upon reception of a Be_CH_EWBCA message from
a cluster head, a node may decides to send a
JOIN_EWBCA message to it.
Step5 Then the cluster head send an Accept_ EWBCA
message to a requesting node to determine its status.
Otherwise the node may send a UNAccept_EWBCA mes-
sage.
Step6 If a node status is not determined up to this step,
the node will continue again from step 2. Also all nodes in
the network periodically broadcast a Hello message to
inform their 1-hop neighbors from their current states.
3.2 Clustering Maintenance Phase
There are two situations that invoke the clustering main-
tenance. One is node movement to the outside of its clus-
ter boundary and the other is excessive battery consump-
tion at a cluster head.
A node may join or leave an existing cluster at a time.
In such a case, the status of the node should be updated
again. Even if it doesn’t find a new cluster head, intro-
Each cluster head updates the amount of consumed
energy when it sends and receives packets. If amount of
consumed energy becomes more than a given threshold
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value, the new cluster head is determined and the current
cluster head node becomes an ordinary node. The mem-
ber nodes of the cluster also rejoin the determined cluster
head if it is available.
4 ROUTING
4.1 Route Discovery
Each node maintains the routing table which the informa-
tion about routes is stored. When the source node S wants
to send data to the destination node D, and it does not
already have a valid route to that destination in its
routing table, first S check its neighbor table. If there is a
match, it simple adds this route into routing table and
directly send data to D. otherwise it initiates a path dis-
covery process to locate the destination.
First the source node S sends route request packet to
its neighbors. After receiving this RREQ packet by a node,
if it is not destination node D and its type is only cluster
head or gateway, it retransmits the RREQ packet to all its
neighbors. This process is iterated until RREQ is deli-
vered to node D or RREQ packet is expired. Intermediate
nodes aren’t allowed to send back a reply packet to
source node S, even if they know the routes to destination
node. Along the route, residual energy of each node is
attained. At last, the least amount of residual energy be-
tween the nodes of path is set into MIN_ENG variable in
RREQ packet. When first RREQ packet is received by the
destination node D, it waits to recieve same RREQ pack-
ets from other paths for given time period.
With expiration of waiting time period, destination
node selects a route that has higher MIN_ENG (minimum
energy) and through it, sends back a RREP packet to
source node. To prevent from routing loop, every route
discovery packet has a unique ID. The source node S up-
dates the routing table by receiving RREP packet from
destination node and then it starts to send data. This me-
thod causes balancing energy consumption among all the
existing routes to the destination node.
4.2 Route Maintenance
Due to node movements, disappearance of nodes or link
breakage in an active route, we may need to recover the
route or report failure to affected nodes.
In the previous methods if a node failed within a route
or become far from its neighbor nodes, it causes the route
to fail and leads to the recreating of path.
In our algorithm, when a link breakage in an active
route occurs, the node upstream of that breakage may
choose to repair the link locally. To repair the link brea-
kage, the node increments the sequence number for the
destination and then broadcasts a RREQ message for that
destination.
Then the node initiating the repair waits to receive
RREPs in response to the RREQ. During local repair, data
packets are buffered. If, at the end of the discovery pe-
riod, the repairing node has not received a RREP for that
destination, it sends a route error packet (RERR) back to
all precursors.
When a node receives a RERR from its neighbor, it
18
forward the packet to precursors stored in its route table.
When a source node receives a RERR, it initiates a new
route discovery if the route is still needed.
5 SIMULATION
In this section, we evaluated the performance of the pro-
posed algorithm in compared to WCA algorithm via simula-
tion. For this purpose, we implemented the proposed algo-
rithm on the GloMoSim (Global Mobile Information System
Simulator) [12] simulator. We simulated a system of N nodes
on an 800 m * 800 m area. The value of N was varied be-
tween 10 and 60. Radio range for each node was set to 250
meters and channel capacity to 2 Mbps. The propagation
model used was the free space model and 802.11 DCF was
used as the MAC layer protocol. Nodes in the simulation
move according to the random waypoint model [13]. The
nodes move randomly in all directions with a maximum
speed of 10 m/s. The AODV [14] that was modified in route
discovery process as we mentioned in section 4, was selected
as an underlying routing protocol. A source node selects its
destination randomly and sends constant bit rate (CBR) traf-
fic through UDP with a rate of 2 packets per second. Each
packet carries 512 bytes of data payload. In our experiments,
the values of weighting factors used in the weight calcula-
tion were set to the C1 = 0.2, C3 =0.7, and C2, C4 are calcu-
lated through linear functions.
The following metrics were applied for measuring the
EWBCA algorithm performance. Also, we compared the
simulation results of our algorithm with WCA algorithm.
 The Average number of clusters
 The Number of re-affiliation
When a node gets dissociated from its cluster head and
becomes a member of another cluster within the current
dominant set, the reaffiliation count is incremented.
 The End-to-end throughput
 Normalized routing overhead
The sum of the routing control messages per one node such
as HELLO, JOIN, RREQ, RREP, etc counted by kByte.
 The Average Consumed Energy per node
16
14
Average number of clusters
12
10
8
6
4 EWBCA
2 WCA
0
10 20 30 40 50 60
Number of Nodes
Fig. 1 : Average number of clusters vs Number of nodes
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The average energy was used at every node for transmitting
and receiving packets, sensing signals and being idle.
5.1 Simulation Results & Performance Analysis
Fig. 1 compares the average number of clusters formed
for EWBCA and WCA with respect to the total number of
nodes in the ad hoc network. As the number of nodes
increased, the average number of clusters increased in
both algorithms. It can be seen that with increasing node
density, EWBCA produced less clusters than WCA.
In Fig. 2, the result of the average number of re-
Regardless of the number of nodes, EWBCA performed
better in comparison with WCA.
The comparison of routing overhead is shown in Fig. 4
Routing overhead is the sum of control messages like
RREQ, RREP, Hello_Pkt, Weight_Pkt, etc that influences
on the battery energy and at last on the algorithm per-
1100
1000
900

Routing Overhead(KB)
affiliations due to node movement and mobility is de- 800
picted. It can be seen that EWBCA gave less re-affiliation 700
than WCA with increment of the number of nodes.
600
Fig. 3 shows the result of end-to-end throughput of
CBR traffics. The proposed algorithm produced 10.2% 500 EWBCA
better throughput than WCA for the node speed of 10 400 WCA
300
50
200
Average number of reaffiliations

45
100
40
0
35
10 20 30 40 50 60
30
25 Number of Nodes
20 EWBCA
15 Fig. 4 : Routing overhead vs Number of nodes
WCA
10
formance. The produced overhead in EWBCA algorithm
5
is less than that in WCA algorithm.
0 The Average energy consumption per node during si-
10 20 30 40 50 60 mulation time period is depicted in Fig. 5. As the number
Number of Nodes of nodes increased, the nodes consumed more battery
power.
The EWBCA algorithm provided smaller energy con-
sumption per node in comparison with WCA. This result
Fig. 2 : Average number of Reaffiliation vs Number of nodes
proved the effect of clustering technique in reduction of
energy consumption.

m/s when the number of nodes was 10. Also, when there
were 60 nodes, our algorithm gave 11% better throughput 8
Average Consumed Energy per node(J)

for the node speed of 10 m/s. As the node density became

7
higher, our algorithm and WCA gave lower throughput.
6
5
4
EWBCA
3
WCA
2
1
0
10 20 30 40 50 60
Number of Nodes

Fig. 5 : Average Consumed Energy per node vs number of nodes

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[8] Chatterjee, M., Das, S., and Turgut, D., “WCA: a weighted
we used the weight factor for the nodes. To calculate
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[9] W. Choi, M. Woo.” A Distributed Weighted Clustering
neighbors. EWBCA algorithm has been compared with
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WCA algorithm to evaluate its performance. Simulation
2006.
demonstrated that our suggested algorithm provides less
[10] Nocetti, F. G., Gonzalez, J. S., and Stojmenovic, I., “Con-
number of clusters, smaller routing overhead, more end-
nectivity Based k-Hop Clustering in Wireless Networks,”
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[12] UCLA Computer Science Department Parallel Computing
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18
End‐to‐end throughput(kbits/sec)

15

12

9
EWBCA

6 WCA

0
10 20 30 40 50 60
Number of Nodes

Fig. 3 : End-to-End throughput vs number of nodes