A Distributed Approach to Constructing k-Hop Connected Dominating Set in Ad Hoc Networks

Since ad hoc networks do not have fixed or predefined infrastructures, nodes need to frequently flood control messages to discover and maintain routes, which causes performance problems in terms of unnecessary traffic and energy consumption, contention, and collision. A general solution is to construct a virtual backbone as the basis of routing and broadcasting, and the Connected Dominating Set (CDS) has been widely used. This paper gives a distributed approach to constructing k-Hop CDS with three unique characteristics: (1) the limitation on the range of k has been removed, (2) a token-based conflict avoidance mechanism has been introduced which can make the construction process faster and more effective, (3) a tree-type CDS can be constructed in bottom-up processing. Simulation experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.