Investigation of Cluster Based Adhoc Routing Protocols

Information exchange among the nodes in mobile adhoc network is very complex task to perform. This task is usually performed by adhoc routing protocols. Although ample of routing protocol has been proposed to perform communication in MANET's, but rarely any of them has been rigorously analysed over large number of nodes and many of these include the simulation studies showing their relative merits and de-merits under various performance parameter for relatively small number of nodes. These simulation studies do not show how any of the protocols scale to the large number of nodes. As the number of users continuous to grow, adhoc routing protocol will be required to scale to increasingly large number of nodes. There are many approaches in adhoc routing which are being previously discussed and described which may prove more scalable. Clustering approaches can be preferable for making attempts to increase protocol scalability.

This paper documents the existing clustering approaches for mobile adhoc network (MANET). Firstly this paper identifies the issues and the challenges in existing clustering approaches of MANETs. Then a brief classification of different clustering schemes is discussed. At last a comparison of various cluster based routing protocols has been done with their merits and demerits. This study is helpful to decide that which protocol should be used to enhance the scalability of the existing clustering based approaches.