Construction and maintenance of virtual backbone in wireless networks

In ad hoc wireless networks, there is no predefined infrastructure and nodes communicate with each other via peer communications. In order to make routing efficient in such networks the connected dominating set (CDS) can act as virtual backbone for the network. A smaller virtual backbone suffers less from the interference problem and incurs less maintenance overhead. Computing minimum CDS backbone is proven to be NP-Hard, it is therefore desirable to use efficient heuristic algorithms to find a virtual backbone of small size. Diameter and average backbone path length (ABPL) are other major criteria for evaluation of the backbone produced by an algorithm. In this paper, after giving a brief survey of classical CDS algorithms, two new centralized algorithms are described for the construction of the virtual backbone and their performance has been compared with five recent algorithms (two centralized and three distributed) along the parameters: size, diameter, and ABPL. The new algorithms perform better on most of the criteria. The re-construction of entire CDS upon movement or failure of a few nodes is very costly in terms of processing power, battery utilization, bandwidth utilization etc., as compared to maintaining the CDS for the affected nodes, since the re-construction of the CDS is to be performed for the whole network while maintenance involves the affected nodes and their neighbours only. A new distributed algorithm is described that maintains the virtual backbone on movement or failure of a single node. The overhead of CDS maintenance with this algorithm compares very favourably against that of re-construction.