A 3-hop message relay algorithm for connected dominating sets in wireless ad-hoc sensor networks

A connected dominating set (CDS) performs a vital role in wireless ad-hoc sensor networks, which can establish virtual backbones and thus leads to less maintenance overhead and information exchanges in wireless communications. In the literature, many distributed algorithms applied in wireless ad-hoc sensor networks have been proposed. However, we find many of these algorithms are divided into different phases. The next phase stars to run until the previous phase completes in sequence. At this point the different phase must be synchronized before continuing with the next phase. Thus such distributed algorithms may suffer from high time delay for leaving sufficient time to end up the previous phase. In this paper, we present a distributed algorithm to constuct a CDS in wireless ad-hoc sensor networks. Our algorithm is an asynchronous distributed algorithm and converges quickly. According to the fact that a maximum independent set (MIS) is also a dominating set, the algorithm constructs a CDS by establishing an MIS first and then adds new nodes to the MIS to let subgraph induced by these nodes be connected. The algorithm requires only local information and iterative rounds of message exchanges among neighbors. Every node can obtain such necessary knowledge to form a CDS by 3-hop message relay asynchronously. As for the diameter of CDS proved as a significant factor, we also do some simulation work including the diameter of CDS generated by our algorithm besides the size of CDS.