Copyright © 2013 Tao Wang and William N. N. Hung. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are gaining popularity in recent years due to their flexibility, the proliferation of smart computing devices, and developments in wireless communications. Due to the mobile nature of the network, creating reliable clusters that can sustain for long period of time is a challenging problem. In this paper, we use probabilistic analysis to guide our clustering algorithm towards more reliable clusters. We also use scatter search to perform clustering while considering various performance metrics. Experiment results show that our clustering approach produces more reliable clusters than prior approaches.