A Dominating-Set-Based Routing Scheme in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Efficient routing among a set of mobile hosts (also called nodes) is one of the most important functions in ad hoc wireless networks. Routing based on a connected dominating set is a promising approach, where the searching space for a route is reduced to nodes in the set. A set is dominating if all the nodes in the system are either in the set or neighbors of nodes in the set. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient distributed algorithm for calculating connected dominating set in ad hoc wireless networks, where connections of nodes are determined by their geographical distances. We also propose an update/recalculation algorithm for the connected dominating set when the topology of the ad hoc wireless network changes dynamically. Our simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms a classical algorithm in terms of finding a small connected dominating set and doing so quickly. Our approach can be potentially used in designing efficient routing algorithms based on a connected dominating set.