Construction and maintenance of k-hop CDS in MANET with two classes of mobile terminals

Since mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) do not have fixed or predefined infrastructures, nodes need to frequently flood control messages to discovery and maintain routes, which causes performance problems in traffic and energy consumption, contention, and collision. A general solution is to construct a virtual backbone as the basis of routing and broadcasting, and the connected dominating set (CDS) has been widely used. This paper presents a distributed approach to constructing and maintaining a k-hop CDS in the MANET with two classes of nodes. A unique characteristic that differentiates the proposed approach from existing ones is that, any value can be specified for k, and a larger k contributes to a smaller CDS. If k is large enough, the resulting CDS will contain only a single node. Especially, the constructed CDS will be more robust, and will be little affected by the topology change of a MANET.