Local maintenance of virtual backbone in mobile ad hoc networks

A connected dominating set used as a virtual backbone in ad hoc networks has the advantage of reducing both communication overhead and power consumption. Many virtual backbone construction methods have been proposed in recent years, but a few of them focus on the maintenance issue. Since the topology changes caused by node mobility or switch off may dramatic in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) or wireless sensor networks (WSNs), in this paper, we propose a localized virtual backbone maintenance scheme to retain the virtual backbone stable when network topology changed. The time complexity of proposed algorithm is O(Δ²) and the message complexity is O(Δ), where Δ is the maximum node degree. The simulation results on ns-2 demonstrate that our scheme outperforms other approaches in a dense and low mobility network environment in terms of packet consumption and number of involved nodes.