Multiple Disjoint Power Aware Minimum Connected Dominating Sets for Efficient Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc Network

Dominating set based routing is emerging as a promising approach for routing in ad hoc wireless networks. A set is dominating if all the nodes in the network are either in the set or neighbors of nodes in the set. Power aware minimum connected dominating set refers to a minimum connected dominating set where energy levels of all dominator nodes are above a predefined threshold level. Usually, nodes in the connected dominating set consume more energy in order to handle various bypass traffics than nodes outside the set. If we want to prolong the life span of each node in the network by balancing their energy consumption, nodes should be alternated in being chosen to form a connected dominating set. With this objective, a distributed algorithm is presented to construct multiple node-disjoint power aware minimum connected dominating sets, based on our initial proposal for single power aware MCDS. Applying existing prominent multipath routing strategies on this multiple dominating set, we show that the new algorithm yields better results in terms of maximizing routing tasks, minimizing average energy consumption per packet, and enhancing lifetime of each node in the network.