Efficient Algorithms for Connected Dominating Sets in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

A \emph {Connected Dominating Set} (CDS) can be used as a routing backbone in ad hoc networks and a data gathering/dissemination infrastructure in sensor networks. This virtual backbone can efficiently narrow down the search space for a route to the nodes in the CDS and thus be used by any routing protocol. Ideally, the backbone should constitute the smallest percentage of nodes in the network. However, finding a \emph{Minimum CDS} (MCDS) is an NP-hard problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient distributed algorithm to construct a CDS in general graphs. The time and message complexity of our algorithm is linear in the number of nodes and degree of the network. Extensive simulations on \emph{Unit Disk Graphs} (UDGs) show that this algorithm outperforms the distributed algorithms proposed in \cite{Butenko}, \cite{Zone-Based}, \cite{WAF}, and \cite{ECDS} in terms of the size of the CDS. We also present a local implementation of our algorithm in location-aware UDGs. Our algorithm provides the flexibility to arbitrarily adjust the trade-off between the degree of locality and the size of the generated CDS.