Abstract: Communication in MANET while not having any fixed infrastructure has drawn abundant attention for research. The infrastructure primarily based cellular architecture sets up base stations to support the node mobility. Thus, mapping the ideas of base stations into MANET might meet its challenges like restricted battery power, available band, scalability width etc. Exhaustive simulation based survey has been conducted to study the strengths and weaknesses of existing algorithms that motivated for the design of energy efficient clustering in MANET. Proposed algorithm has been designed to assist the nodes to probe their immediate neighbours. In this protocol, each node broadcasts its own information to the network, in order that it received from a node that lies within its transmission range of the MANET. This algorithm is validated through simulation by using Colour Petri Nets (CPN) before its implementation. We have proposed an efficient method for cluster head selection in Topology robust clustering algorithm (TRCA), that applies the node mobility and its available battery power for calculating the node weights.
Keywords: Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), Cluster head, Non Volunteer head, clustering in MANET.