Performance Comparison Study of Connected Dominating Set Algorithms for Mobile Ad hoc Networks under Different Mobility Models

The high-level contribution of this paper is an exhaustive simulation-based comparison study of three categories (density, node id and stability-based) of algorithms to determine connected dominating sets (CDS) for mobile ad hoc networks and evaluate their performance under two categories (random node mobility and grid-based vehicular ad hoc network) of mobility models. The CDS algorithms studied are the maximum density-based (MaxD-CDS), node ID-based (ID-CDS) and the minimum velocity-based (MinV-CDS) algorithms representing the density, node id and stability categories respectively. The node mobility models used are the Random Waypoint model (representing random node mobility) and the City Section and Manhattan mobility models (representing the grid-based vehicular ad hoc networks). The three CDS algorithms under the three mobility models are evaluated with respect to two critical performance metrics: the effective CDS lifetime (calculated taking into consideration the CDS connectivity and absolute CDS lifetime) and the CDS node size. Simulations are conducted under a diverse set of conditions representing low, moderate and high network density, coupled with low, moderate and high node mobility scenarios. For each CDS, the paper identifies the mobility model that can be employed to simultaneously maximize the lifetime and minimize the node size with minimal tradeoff. For the two VANET mobility models, the impact of the grid block length on the CDS lifetime and node size is also evaluated.