F. Chender, A. Hafid (Canada), A. Benslimane (France), and T.J. Kwon (USA)
Clustering, geographic, flooding, routing ad hoc networks, sensor networks
The traditional flooding technique is widely used in sensors and mobile ad hoc networks to find a feasible path to a given destination. This technique generates considerable overhead and thus causes high energy consumption by the network nodes. To reduce overhead clustering techniques have been proposed. The basic idea of clustering is to select a set of cluster heads among the nodes in the network and cluster the rest of the nodes with these heads. Gateways are chosen to connect clusters. Then, only cluster heads and gateways perform flooding. The exclusion of non-cluster heads and gateways from flooding improves greatly the flooding efficiency. Most of clustering protocols make use of active signaling, i.e., exchanging extra-packets, for the formation of the cluster structure. There is one clustering protocol, called Passive clustering (PC), which does not require explicit signaling and efficiently controls the number of flooding packets on the fly, without requiring any prior structure. This reduces overhead and alleviates other limitations of active clustering. In this paper we propose a protocol, called Geography based Passive Clustering (GPC), which uses (a) passive clustering to limit the flooding to cluster heads and gateways and (b) geographic coordinates, whenever available, of the network nodes to limit the number of cluster heads and gateways involved in the flooding. Simulations show that GPC outperforms existing protocols; it generates far less overhead and thus reduces considerably energy consumption of the network nodes (i.e., increases the lifetime of the network).
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