Strong Neighborhood Based Stable Connected Dominating Sets for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

We propose an algorithm to determine stable connected dominating sets (SN-CDS) for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) using the notion of a “strong neighborhood,” defined based on a “threshold neighborhood distance ratio” (TNDR ≤ 1). A node j at a physical Euclidean distance of r from node i is said to be in the strong neighborhood of node i if r/R ≤ TNDR where R is the fixed transmission range of all nodes in the network. A non-CDS node is said to be covered it at least one of its neighbor nodes is in the SN-CDS. The proposed algorithm prefers to include a covered node with the maximum number (≥ 1) of uncovered neighbors into the SN-CDS; ties are broken using node ids. The algorithm stops when every node is either in the SN-CDS or has at least one neighbor node in the SN-CDS. If TNDR = 1, then SN-CDS corresponds to the maximum-density based CDS (MaxD-CDS) algorithm, a heuristic to approximate a CDS with the minimum number of constituent nodes. We observe that an SN-CDS (with TNDR < 1) has a significantly longer lifetime than a MaxD-CDS and for a given condition of network density and node mobility, the difference in the lifetime increases as the value of TNDR decreases. The tradeoff is lower connectivity as well as a larger constituent node size and hop count per path.