A distributed approach for computng the minimum connected dominating set in ad hoc networks

Abstract

In ad-hoc networks, an optimized way of flooding packets is to find the minimum connected dominating set (MCDS). Nodes belonging to the MCDS set are responsible for relaying messages, while other nodes are not. The problem of finding a small size MCDS is known to be NP-hard. Most of previous methods, such as CDS-based and weakly-CDS, have followed combinatorial approach or graph coloration technique to find an approximate solution. However, these methods are centralized. In order to give a distributed solution with less computing complexity, this paper proposes a new approach of employing integer linear program. This approach offers a two-step scheme to solve the small size MCDS problem. In the first step, the size of the dominating set is minimized with the constraint that each node in the network needs to be either in this set or adjacent to at least one dominating set node. The aim of this step is to find the minimum dominating set (MDS), where the elements are not connected yet. The second step finds the spanning tree for the MDS set to get all of its elements connected. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we compute the size of MCDS in a variety of graphs, Simulation results show that our approach has a very good performance in parameters such as size of MCDS and computing complexity compared with CDS-B and WCDS approaches