A pure localized algorithm for finding connected dominating set in MANETs by classification of neighbors

An important problem in wireless ad hoc networks is to select a few nodes to form a virtual backbone that supports routing and other tasks such as area monitoring. Connected dominating set (CDS) has been proposed to approximate the virtual backbone. Although computing minimum CDS is known to be NP-hard, many distributed protocols have been presented to construct small CDS. However, these protocols are either too complicated, need non-local information or have slow convergence speed, are not adaptive to topology changes. In this paper, we propose a new pure localized algorithm for computing the approximate solution to the minimum CDS problem. The algorithm starts with a feasible and near-optimal CDS solution via marking process based on classification of neighbors, and removes vertices from this solution by redundancy elimination, until an approximate CDS is found. Both analytical and experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm has better performance than other distributed algorithms.