Single-Initiator CDS Construction for Wireless Networks with Directional Antennas

Referred to as the directed virtual backbone, a directed connected dominating set (DCDS) is a subgraph of the graph representation of wireless networks in which each node has a different transmission range and is equipped with a directional antenna. Considering the applications of DCDS, the size of the DCDS and the overhead for DCDS construction should be minimized. While a number of protocols to approximate the minimum CDS have been proposed, only one DCDS protocol exists which works in such a special hardware setting. In this paper, we propose the Timer-Based Directed CDS protocol (TB-DCDS), which creates a small DCDS for wireless networks with directional antennas. We show that our TB-DCDS protocol is compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard and prove the proposed protocol to successfully create a DCDS for wireless networks with such antennas. The simulation results show that our proposed protocol is not only capable of creating a small DCDS with low communication overhead, but also scalable and energy-efficient.