A Review of the Replicability and Implementation of the Efficient Clustering Scheme for MANETs in Remote Canadian Communities

Abstract

Remote communities in Canada lack Internet availability and connectivity. With online interactions becoming increasingly necessary in recent years, this lack of availability has furthered the Digital Divide in Canada. Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are an alternative to traditional networking options that can help community members use digital applications to communicate with one another more reliably. Leveraging clustering in MANETs has the potential to further increase connectivity and reliability for users, while also limiting the overhead of the networks. The Efficient Clustering Scheme (ECS) is one such clustering algorithm, that has the potential to be employed in remote community due to its key properties of clusterguest nodes and lack of Network downtime for restructuring. Unfortunately, due to the lack of reproducibility of MANET research, many untested assumptions are required to employ the ECS, threatening its applicability as its introduction could lead to further issues for the community members. Therefore, this thesis explores the implementation of ECS and attempts to replicate the previous study by simulating how the ECS would operate in an area with a similar density to Rigolet, a remote Canadian community in Nunatsiavut.