Abstract
Cluster-based network is a proven architecture for energy-aware routing, but more attention is required to ameliorate the energy consumption aspect of its cluster designing process. In this research work, we introduce a novel design of clustered network architecture. The proposed design technique is innovative in its idea. The general trend in this scene is either centralized decision at base station for cluster head selection and its members or distributed decision by exchanging information between neighboring nodes until the cluster head and its members are selected. Both the techniques drastically create mess in energy consumption due to too much broadcasting, especially in large networks as well as message exchange until some final decision is made. Our novel layer-based hybrid algorithm for cluster head and cluster member selection comes up to novel communication architecture. Since its substantial constituent is cluster designing, we named it Multilayer Cluster Designing Algorithm (MCDA). The proposed design not only has effect on lessening blind broadcasting, but also on decreasing the message exchange in a passionate way. It also encapsulates the beauty of efficient centralized decision making for cluster designing and energy-aware distributed cluster head selection and cluster member allocation process. Comprehensive experimentations have been performed on the comparative analysis of MCDA with state-of-the-art centralized and distributed cluster designing approaches present in published literature. Calculation of energy consumption in various operational parametric values, number of clusters designed and the number of packets broadcasted during cluster designing are the main performance evaluation parameters. It has been found that MCDA outperforms compared to its three competing algorithms with respect to the aforementioned parameters due to its multilayered synergistic mating approach.