Virtual Backbone-Based Routing in Multihop Ad Hoc Wireless Networks
Xiuzhen Cheng, Ding‐Zhu Du · 2002
Recent research ([12][15][19]) shows that the flooding mechanism (for topology update or route request) used in existing protocols for ad hoc wireless networks greatly degrades the network capacity. If we force the effective broadcasts of control packets happen in a small subset of hosts in the network, the protocol overhead caused by global flooding can be substantially reduced. This is the basic idea of virtual backbone-based routing in ad hoc wireless networks, in which all hosts forming the virtual backbone are in charge of control packets dissemination. This strategy works quite effectively in decreasing message overhead. However, constructing a virtual backbone is not trivial. In our study, the virtual backbone is approximated by minimum connected dominating set (MCDS) in unit-disk graphs, which is NP-hard [9]. We propose two distributed time/message efficient approximation algorithms to compute MCDS. Both algorithms have linear message complexities. Algorithm I is cost-aware, which accommodates the strict network resources in virtual backbone construction.