UCDS: Unifying Connected Dominating Set With Low Message Complexity, Fault Tolerance, and Flexible Dominating Factor

A connected dominating set (CDS) of a graph G consists of a set of dominating nodes, where each node in G is either a member of the set or 1 hop away from a member, and a set of connecting nodes, which connect disjoint sets of dominating nodes. CDSs have traditionally been used in mobile ad-hoc networks for routing applications [1], but these networks could benefit from CDSs in other areas as well, including channel access, link adaptation, energy consumption, power control, and dynamic resource management. It has been shown in [13] and [14] that the minimum dominating set problem (MDS) and minimum connected dominating sets problem (MCDS) are NP-Complete. The following is a presentation of a simple, efficient CDS heuristic that works equally well for and runs independently of all of these CDS applications. For its ability to simultaneously support multiple applications it is called the "Unifying Connected Dominating Set" (UCDS) protocol.