Dominant set based ALLIANCES: A new approach to handle bursty traffic and collisions in sensor networks

ALLIANCES is a cooperative random access protocol proposed for taking advantage of diversity and resolving collisions in wireless networks. A multicluster extension of ALLIANCES was also proposed that enables its application to a large-scale wireless sensor network (WSN). In this paper, we propose a dominating set based approach coupled with destination-based routing to solve the problem in a large-scale WSN without the need of a clustering protocol. The approach is based on the concept of dominating set in graph theory. A subset of vertices of a graph is a dominating set if every vertex not in the subset is adjacent to at least one of the vertex in the subset. The nodes will transmit to only one of its dominating neighbors based on the packets destination. A particular (dominating or non-dominating) node can have more than one dominating neighbor, and the transmitted next hop will always be a dominating node based on the destination. We have shown that this approach can achieve a better performance in terms of throughput (successfully transmitted packets per timeslot) and delay. Also, there are evidences that in an ad-hoc network, the dominating set based approach can yield more stability to the network (in terms of lifetime of nodes) than the clustering approach. So, overall, in an ad-hoc network, we expect much better performance by adopting dominating set based approach to ALLIANCES.