Efficient routing among a set of mobile hosts is one of the most important functions in ad hoc wireless networks. Routing based on a connected dominating set is a promising approach, where the search space for a route is reduced to the hosts in the set. A set is dominating if all the hosts in the system are either in the set or neighbors of hosts in the set. The efficiency of dominating-set-based routing mainly depends on the overhead introduced in the formation of the dominating set and the size of the dominating set. In this paper, we first review a localized formation of a connected dominating set called marking process and dominating-set-based routing. Then, we propose a dominant pruning rule to reduce the size of the dominating set. This dominant pruning rule (called Rule k) is a generalization of two existing rules (called Rule 1 and Rule 2, respectively). We prove that the vertex set derived by applying Rule k is still a connected dominating set. Rule k is more effective in reducing the dominating set derived from the marking process than the combination of Rules 1 and 2 and, surprisingly, in a restricted implementation with local neighborhood information, Rule k has the same communication complexity and less computation complexity. Simulation results confirm that Rule k outperforms Rules 1 and 2, especially in networks with relatively high vertex degree and high percentage of unidirectional links. We also prove that an upper bound exists on the average size of the dominating set derived from Rule k in its restricted implementation.

An extended localized algorithm for connected dominating set formation in ad hoc wireless networks