Load-balanced CDS construction in wireless sensor networks via genetic algorithm

A Connected Dominating Set (CDS) is used as a virtual backbone for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Most existing works focus on a Minimum CDS (MCDS), a k-connect mdominating CDS, a minimum routing cost CDS or a bounded-diameter CDS, ignoring the loadbalance factor of CDSs. In this paper, we propose a novel problem – the Load-Balanced CDS (LBCDS) problem, in which constructing an LBCDS and load-balancedly allocating dominatees to dominators are investigated simultaneously. A Genetic Algorithm based strategy called LBCDS-GA is proposed to construct an LBCDS. Building an LBCDS and load-balancedly allocating dominatees to dominators can prolong network lifetime through balancing the workloads of all the dominators. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our proposed methods extend network lifetime by 65% on average compared with the best and latest MCDS construction algorithm.