An evolutionary algorithmic approach to construct Connected Dominating Set in MANETs

A virtual backbone of a MANETs is typically the Connected Dominating Set (CDS) of the graph representation of the network. The CDS in the MANETs helps to increase the efficiency of the network and extends the life span of the network. While existing CDS protocols are successful in constructing CDS of small size, they either require localized information beyond immediate neighbors, lack the mechanism to properly handle nodal mobility, or involve lengthy recovery procedure when CDS becomes corrupted. In general, the smaller the CDS is, the less communication and storage overhead the protocols making use of CDS will incur. Hence, it is desired that the size of the CDS for mobile ad hoc networks to be as small as possible. On the other hand, it is known that the problem of finding the Minimum Connected Dominating Set (MCDS) is NP-hard. As the construction of MCDS is an NP-hard problem, this proposed work incorporates an evolutionary algorithmic approach using Genetic algorithm to minimize the number of nodes in the CDS.