A navigation route based minimum dominating set algorithm in VANETs

Information dissemination (usually done by broadcasting), has been always a hot research topic in wireless ad hoc networks. It is even more significant in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET), where broadcast is adopted by most applications, e.g. emergency information dissemination. Among others, minimum dominating set (MDS) is perceived to be an efficient approach for information dissemination in ad hoc networks. However, constructing MDS, or even its approximation, is not a trivial task. Although a number of MDS algorithms have been proposed, constructing MDS in VANETs is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we consider to make use of vehicle navigation information in selecting MDS. Most existing vehicles are equipped with GPS-based navigation system, which is used to plan and maintain the travel route of vehicles. In our work, the travel route information is used to estimate the duration and stability of links in a VANET and then MDS nodes are selected according to link stability. Following such an idea, we design a new metric to select dominating nodes and also the corresponding algorithm to construct MDS. Simulations via ns3 show that, our new algorithm can outperform similar ones with significant advantage.