Zone-based virtual backbone formation in wireless ad hoc networks

Efficient protocol for clustering and backbone formation is one of the most important issues in wireless ad hoc networks. Connected dominating set (CDS) formation is a promising approach for constructing virtual backbone. However, finding the minimum CDS in an arbitrary graph is a NP-Hard problem. In this paper, we present a novel zone-based distributed algorithm for CDS formation in wireless ad hoc networks. In this Zone algorithm, we combine the zone and level concepts to sparsify the CDS constructed by previous well-known approaches. Therefore, this proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the CDS size. Particularly, we partition the wireless network into different zones, construct a dominating tree for each zone and connect adjacent zones by inserting additional connectors into the final CDS (at the zone borders). Our comprehensive simulation study using a custom simulator shows that this zone-based algorithm is more effective than previous approaches. The number of nodes in the CDS formed by this Zone algorithm is up to around 66% less than that constructed by others. Moreover, we also compare the performance of Zone algorithm with some recently proposed CDS formation protocols in ns2 simulator.