An energy efficient MCDS construction algorithm for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor network, a connected dominating set (CDS) can be used as a virtual backbone for efficient routing. Constructing a minimal CDS (MCDS) is good for packet routing and energy efficiency, but is an NP-hard problem. In this article, an efficient approximation MCDS construction algorithm E-MCDS (energy efficient MCDS construction algorithm) is proposed which explicitly takes energy consumption into account. E-MCDS contains two stages: the CDS construction stage and the pruning stage. The constructed CDS is approximately composed of two independent sets (IS). The performance ratio of E-MCDS is analysed in both unit disk graph and disk graphs with bidirectional links, being 9.33opt and 17.33nkopt, respectively. The message complexity of E-MCDS is O(n). The simulation results have shown that E-MCDS performs well both in terms of the size of CDS constructed and the energy efficiency.