On the Construction of 2-Connected Virtual Backbones in Wireless Networks

Virtual backbone has been proposed as the routing infrastructure to alleviate the broadcasting storm problem in ad hoc networks. Since the nodes in the virtual backbone need to carry other node’s traffic, and node and link failure are inherent in wireless networks, it is desirable that the virtual backbone is fault tolerant. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm called Connecting Dominating Set Augmentation (CDSA) to construct a 2-connected virtual backbone which can resist the failure of one wireless node. We prove that CDSA has guaranteed quality, because the size of the CDSA constructed 2-connected backbone is within a constant factor of the optimal 2-connected virtual backbone size. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that CDSA can improve the fault tolerance of virtual backbone with only marginal extra overhead.