On the impact of clustering for Energy critical Public Safety Networks

In the event of man made disasters the critical infrastructure is not available. In the absence of any centralized control it is important to devise energy efficient techniques for routing. This paper presents a comparison of clustering techniques for enabling energy-aware routing in Device to Device (D2D) communication for Public Safety Networks. This work compares different clustering schemes in terms of throughput, energy consumption, residual energy and number of dead nodes through extensive simulations. Clustering with gateway outperforms both clustering without gateway and no clustering by 90% and 100%, respectively in terms of throughput. Similarly an improvement of 50% and 100% is observed in terms of energy consumption over the other two schemes. Clustering with a provision of gateway nodes is an energy efficient mechanism for D2D communication since it increases the overall network lifetime.