On the construction of virtual backbone for ad hoc wireless network

Ad hoc wireless network is featured by dynamic topology. There is no fixed infrastructure as compared with wired network. Every host can move to any direction at any speed. This characteristic puts special challenges in routing protocol design. Most existing well-known routing protocols use flooding for route construction. But, flooding suffers from the notorious broadcast storm problem which causes excessive redundancy, contention and collision in the network. One solution to overcome this problem is to compute a virtual backbone based on the physical topology, and run any existing routing protocol over the virtual backbone. In our study, the virtual backbone is approximated by a minimum connected dominating set (MCDS). We compute a spanning tree with as many leaves as possible. All the non-leaf nodes form a CDS. The performance of our algorithm is witnessed by simulation result and theoretical analysis.