Research Of Hierarchical Collaborative Applications Oriented MANET Clustering Algorithm

With the popularization of mobile equipments and rapid development of mobile communication technology, the demand for mobile collaboration is rising. Researches of mobile collaboration have become a hot point of mobile computing field. As the practical technology of mobile collaboration in cellular network develops, mobile collaboration in mobile ad hoc network (MANET) starts to be researched.The three chief characteristics of mobile collaboration in MANET are hierarchy, group mobility and group communication. There are frequent traffics between the nodes within the same group. For improving effectiveness of collaboration in MANET, We must optimize routing inside the each group. It requires clustering algorithms to group the nodes of the same group to one cluster. Most existing clustering algorithms are based on network topology information. Some of them use the mobility information of the nodes. But none of them explores and uses group mobility information of the nodes, so all the existing clustering algorithms can't support mobile collaboration well in MANET. With farther analysis we know that exploring group mobility based on the mobility information of the nodes in MANET is difficult.To support mobile collaboration in MANET, we proposed Maximum Local Communication Clustering Algorithm (MLCCA). Different from all known clustering algorithms, MLCCA is based on local traffics information. It has improved the flexibility of the algorithm.We have simulated MLCCA under MANET Simulation Environment (MANSE) that is developed by us. We have studied the impact that the speed of nodes and the number of the groups and the overload of network communications have on the performance of MLCCA. We have analyzed the difference of MLCCA and modified Lowest ID clustering algorithm under mobile collaboration environment. By contrast we find MLCCA has better performance under mobile collaboration environment in MANET.