On calculating power-aware connected dominating sets for efficient routing in ad hoc wireless networks

Efficient routing among a set of mobile hosts (also called nodes) is one of the most important functions in ad hoc wireless networks. Routing based on a connected dominating set is a promising approach, where the searching space for a route is reduced to nodes in the set. A set is dominating if all the nodes in the system are either in the set or neighbors of nodes in the set. Wu and Li [1] proposed a simple and efficient distributed algorithm for calculating connected dominating set in ad hoc wireless networks, where connections of nodes are determined by geographical distances of nodes. In general, nodes in the connected dominating set consume more energy in order to handle various bypass traffics than nodes outside the set. To prolong the life span of each node, and hence, the network by balancing the energy consumption in the network, nodes should be alternated in being chosen to form a connected dominating set. In this paper, we propose a method of calculating power-aware connected dominating set. Our simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms several existing approaches in terms of life span of the network.