On locality of dominating set in ad hoc networks with switch-on/off operations

Routing based on a connected dominating set is a promising approach, where the search space for a route is reduced to the hosts in the set. A set is dominating if all the hosts in the system are either in the set or neighbors of hosts in the set. In this paper we first review a distributed formation of a connected dominating set called marking process and dominating-set-based routing. Then we propose several ways to reduce the size of the dominating set and study the locality of dominating set in ad hoc wireless networks with switch-on/off operations. Results show that the dominating set derived from the marking process exhibits good locality properties; i.e., the change of a host status, gateway (dominating) or non-gateway (dominated), affects only the status of hosts in a restricted vicinity.