Connected Dominating Sets in Wireless Sensor Networks

Since there is no fixed infrastructure or centralized management in wireless sensor networks, a connected dominating set (CDS) has been proposed to serve as a virtual backbone. The CDS of a graph representing a network has a significant impact on the efficient design of routing protocols in wireless sensor networks. This problem has been studied extensively, in which all nodes have the same transmission ranges and the size of the dominating sets are considered. In this paper, by the method of constructing the steiner tree, we model a network as an undirected graph and present the CDS which has smaller size. The performance ratio of these algorithms is constant. Furthermore, we show a size relationship between a maximal independent set and a CDS as well as a bound of the maximum number of independent neighbors of a node. The theoretical analysis and simulation results are also presented to verify our approaches.