Distributed Node Location in clustered multi-hop wireless networks

In a wireless multi-hop network, we need to allow the communication between any pair of nodes even if they are not in transmission range of each other. For it, a routing protocol is needed to provide routes between them. But, flat routing protocols (reactive or proactive) do not scale well. Indeed, such routing protocols become ineffective for large scale wireless multi-hop networks, because of bandwidth (flooding of control messages), latency and processing overhead (routing table computation). A well-known solution to overcome this major drawback is to introduce a hierarchy in the network by grouping geographically close nodes into clusters in a distributed and local way. We can thus apply different routing schemes in and between clusters. We thus previously introduced a clustering protocol in [6]. The resulting clusters have been analyzed by theoretical and simulations approaches and have reveal to present better features than other existing ones ([6, 7, 8]. It self-stabilizes in a low and constant time and specifically offers a better stability over node mobility. Because of place limitation, we will not detail our clustering scheme in this paper. We just sum up, in Table 1, the significant properties of the clusters built by these heuristics which have motivate