Distributed Construction of Weakly Connected Dominating Sets for Clustering Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Weakly connected dominating set (WCDS) has been proposed to cluster mobile ad hoc networks and be used as a virtual backbone. There have been some distributed approximation algorithms proposed in the literature for minimum WCDS. But none of them have constant approximation factors. Thus these algorithms can not guarantee to generate a WCDS of small size. Their message complexities may also be as large as ) ( 2 n O . In this paper, we design a new distributed algorithm that outperforms the existing algorithms. This algorithm has an approximation factor of at most 5 and linear message complexity. Our algorithm requires only single-hop neighborhood knowledge and a message length of ) 1 ( O . So it is practical.