Highly stable and adaptive clustering with efficient routing in wireless ad hoc networks

The association and disassociation of mobile nodes to and from the clusters in wireless ad hoc networks disturb the stability of the network and, therefore, the reconfiguration of clusterheads is unavoidable. This paper proposes a Weight Based Adaptive Clustering Algorithm (WBACA) that leads to a high degree of stability in the network. Through simulations we have compared the performance of WBACA with that of the Lowest-ID algorithm and the Weighted Clustering Algorithm (WCA) in terms of the number of clusters formed, number of clusterhead changes, number of reaffiliations, control overheads, throughput, and average packet transfer delay in the network.