A Novel Distributed algorithm for constructing virtual backbones in wireless sensor networks

Abstract In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), energy saving techniques are critical for efficient routing. The Connected Dominating Set (CDS) used as a virtual backbone for saving energy in WSN has been extensively studied in the past two decades. Since the time complexity and performance ratio are two important metrics to evaluate algorithms, reducing the time expenditure of algorithm and the total number of sensors in CDS are two key problems for CDS construction. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm, Dominating Set based on Link and Degree and Connecting Tree (LDDS-CT), to find a Minimum CDS (MCDS). LDDS-CT is divided into two phases. In the first phase, a Dominating Set (DS) is constructed using LDDS. In the second phase, a CT algorithm for connecting all sensors in DS is proposed, which can guarantee the number of connectors added to DS is minimized. This paper proves that the time cost of LDDS-CT is at most 2.25n and the performance ratio of LDDS-CT is at most 14.798 o p t + 9.748 , where n is the number of sensors and opt is the size of any MCDS. To the best of our knowledge, LDDS-CT is the fastest two-phased distributed algorithm for MCDS construction with unknown network topology. And the performance ratio of the proposed algorithm is close to the sate-of-the-art algorithms in theory. The simulation results show that LDDS-CT outperforms the existing distributed algorithms.