Volume 17, No. 2, 2020
Message Ferry Route Calculation through K-means Clustering Algorithm for Partially-Connected MANET
Anand Pandey, Pankaj Singh, Prashant Mani, Saptarshi Gupta and Jay Prakash Narayan Verma
Abstract
Partially-connected MANETs are the Wi-Fi networks where most of the time a comprehensive path between source and destination does not exist due to narrow radio transmission range of the nodes, low density of nodes, wide deployment area, physical obstacles like high rise buildings, severe weather conditions, or other physical factors. The traditional routing protocols of the Mobile Ad-hoc Network presume that the network is connected. There are two possible solutions to solve the connectivity problem in sparse MANET. The first solution makes use of random movement of nodes to transfer messages whereas in the second, one node is given special privileges to roam in the deployment area to distribute messages in segmented areas, which is also called the Message Ferry (MF) approach for transmitting data. Message ferries keep moving in the deployment area and take the charge of storing, carrying and forwarding data of the regular nodes. In the present paper, the ferry-initiated approach has been adopted with 2 ferry nodes, which are allowed to move in such a way that they cover the maximum area of the grid. It is proposed that the ferry nodes will design their routes dynamically on the basis of current topology of MANET and in one round trip it will pass through the centers of the partitioned clusters formed by the regular nodes. The process of calculating cluster center is repeated in further trips. K-means clustering algorithm is applied to calculate the cluster centers of the partitioned clusters. The results indicate positive performances of the proposed model in various simulation experiments conducted.
Pages: 15-30
DOI: 10.14704/WEB/V17I2/WEB17013
Keywords: K-means Clustering Algorithm, Partially Connected MANET, Sparse MANET, DSR, Message Ferry, ns2.