Design of Simulator for Energy Efficient Clustering
in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

The research on various issues in Mobile ad hoc networks are getting popularity because of its challenging nature and all time connectivity to communicate. MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc Networks) is a random deployable network where devices are mobile with dynamic topology. In the network topology, each device is termed as a node and the virtual connectivity among each node is termed as the link .Nodes in a network are dynamically organized into virtual partitions called clusters. Network simulators provide the platform to analyse and imitate the working of computer networks along with the typical devices, traffic and other entities.

Cluster heads being the communication hotspots tend to drain its battery power rapidly while serving its member nodes. Further, energy consumption is a key factor that hinders the deploy ability of a real ad hoc and sensor network. It is due to the limited life time of the battery powered devices that motivates intense research into energy efficient design of operating systems, protocols and hardware devices. Clustering is a proven solution to preserve the battery power of certain nodes. In the mechanism of clustering, there exists a cluster head in every cluster that works similar to a base station in the cellular architecture. Cluster heads being the communication hotspots tend to drain its battery power rapidly while serving its member nodes. Further, energy consumption is a key factor that hinders the deploy ability of a real ad hoc and sensor network. It is due to the limited life time of the battery powered devices that motivates intense research into energy efficient design of operating systems, protocols and hardware devices.

The mobile ad hoc network can be modelled as a unidirectional graph G = (V, L) where V is the set of mobile nodes and L is the set of links that exist between the nodes. We assume that there exists a bidirectional link L between the nodes and when the distance between the nodes < (transmission range) of the nodes. In the dynamic network the cardinality of the nodes remains constant, but the cardinality of links changes due to the mobility of the nodes.

Network simulators are used by researchers, developers and engineers to design various kinds of networks, simulate and then analyze the effect of various parameters on the network performance. A typical network simulator encompasses a wide range of networking technologies and can help the users to build complex networks from basic building blocks such as a variety of nodes and links. The objective of our work is to design a simulator for energy efficient clustering so that the data flow as well as the control flow could be easily handled and maintained.

The proposed energy efficient clustering algorithm is a distributed algorithm that takes into account the consumed battery power of a node and its average transmission power for serving the neighbour nodes as the parameters to decide its suitability to act as a cluster head. These two parameters are added with different weight factors to find the weights of the individual nodes. After the clusters are formed, gateway nodes are selected in the network that help for the inter cluster communication. The graph for the number of cluster heads selected for different number of nodes are also drawn to study the functionality of the simulator.