Message-Efficient CDS construction in MANETs

The connected dominating set (CDS) has been extensively used for routing and broadcast in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Due to the nature of MANETs, it is preferred that the CDS protocol not only creates a CDS with small size, but also incurs less communication and computational overhead, adapts to the nodal mobility, and generates CDS as quickly as possible. While the CDS protocols developed in the past create small size of CDS, they tend to incur too much communication overhead. In this paper, we propose the Message-Efficient Dominator Tree Connection algorithm (ME-DTC), which significantly reduces the number of control messages during the tree connection phase in Tree-based CDS protocols. By incorporating this algorithm with the Multi-Initiator CDS protocol, we have a CDS protocol which meets all the desirable features in MANETs. The simulation as well as analytical results validate that our proposed algorithm achieves its design goals.