Simulation-Based Performance Comparison of VANETs Backbone Formation Algorithms

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are gaining increased interest as the technology that potentially will make the nowadays illusion of mobile computing a tangible reality. vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are the special kind of MANETs that aims at providing communications among vehicles on the roads. The connected dominating set (CDS), a.k.a. virtual backbone or spine, has been proposed to facilitate routing, broadcasting, and establishing a dynamic infrastructure for distributed location databases in VANETs. Minimizing the CDS cardinality simplifies the VANETpsilas abstracted topology and allows for using shorter routes. Since, it is NP-complete to find the minimum size CDS (MCDS), approximation algorithms and heuristics are used to tackle this problem. It has been reported that localized CDS creation algorithms run fast and generate light signaling overhead. Some theoretical performance analysis of these algorithms is presented in the literature; however, this analysis has not been validated across any physical or at least simulation-based measures. Moreover, the cost of maintaining the CDS in the presence of topology changes is an important cost that is overlooked most of the time. In this paper, a simulation-based comparison between the performance of these algorithms is conducted using the ns2 network simulator. Moreover, the effect of mobility rate and network size on the performance of each algorithm is investigated.