An energy-balanced connected dominating sets for data gathering in wireless sensor networks

Connected Dominating Sets (CDS) has been proposed as the virtual backbone to alleviate the broadcasting storm problem and perform some other tasks such as data gathering in wireless sensor networks. Many previous researches mainly focus on how to construct a small virtual backbone for high efficient data gathering, which is modeled as the Minimum Connected Dominating Set (MCDS) problem. However, the MCDS cannot balance the energy consumptions among nodes, which shorten the network lifetime. Therefore, it is desirable to construct an energy-balanced CDS. In this paper, a novel distributed schema, called EBCDS (Energy-Balanced Connected Dominating Sets) algorithm is proposed to balance the energy consumption of the network and enlarge the network lifetime. In EBCDS, each node in the CDS has high energy and large degree, and these nodes form a virtual backbone in the network. By transmitting data through the backbone with small routing space, each node can preserve its energy effectively. Moreover, the nodes in the backbone would not die quickly because of lacking of energy. Theoretical analyses show that EBCDS can construct a CDS with O (nlogn) message complexity, and simulations results prove the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in terms of energy consumption and network lifetime.