How to do Hierarchical Clustering in MENET or Sensor Network Simulation?

There is no ready-made or any simple way to do such clustering in MANET.

There are some sensor network extensions which contain some kind of clustering mechanism. But you can not simply use them in the way in which you want.

Further, most of such available ns-2 extensions will not address the additional overhead involved in doing such clustering under MANET or sensor network.

The main problems are message overhead and battery cost involved in the design of such clustering algorithm.

Some of the ideas that you may see in literature will use the location information of the nodes for such clustering task. But the fact is, in a practical sensor network you can not get location information without battery cost (if you use gps like functionality). Further, nodes should share the location information with one another – That will increase the message overhead tremendously. (most of the papers that you see will not even address these kind of problems in detail – it means, those algorithms will not work in a practical scenario)

You will not see any such complex, so called intelligent clustering based routing in most of the practically deployed sensor network.

The simple, tiny sensor nodes that were commonly used in the fields will not at all having capabilities that will be needed to code such algorithms.

The very obvious fact is, a simple, chip-level/firmware-level sleep-wakeup mechanisms available in the modern, tiny sensor network hardware itself will make the network work even better than any ingenious clustering based algorithm.

So, the answer to your question is somewhat complex.

There is no reliable, genuinely working and good performing clustering protocol available as a ns2 extension. (often, I realize that a well designed WSN will perform very good even without such fancy hierarchical clustering algorithm)

I saw so many students and scholars those who end-up with “FAKE” projects only because of selecting such fake/impractical ideas proposed in some papers.

Anyway, if you are really able to understand what I am telling, then you may start writing your own “genuine” clustering algorithm for ns-2 and prove that it will improve the performance of MANET or WSN and contribute something to the world.