A Distributed Algorithm for Virtual Backbone Construction in Wireless Networks

Connected Dominating Sets(CDSs) can serve as virtual backbones for wireless networks, which can effectively alleviate the serious broadcast storms problem. However, it is not easy to construct the minimum CDS due to the NP-hard nature of the problem. In this paper, we proposed a distributed CDS construction algorithm. Our algorithm includes two stages, Maximum Independent Set(MIS) construction stage and CDS construction stage. In the first stage, a node with more neighbors and smaller ID has the priority to become a member of the MIS. In the second stage, some connectors are selected to make the MIS connected. And redundant connectors are cut off to further reduce the CDS size. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that our algorithm performs well in terms of CDS size and message complexity.