A passive tree-based backbone construction scheme for MANETs

Backbone-based broadcast schemes are effective in alleviating the broadcast storm problem in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). However, periodically hello packets used to maintain a backbone usually lead to extra control overhead. In this paper, passive tree-based backbone construction scheme (PTBCS) is proposed as a backbone construction scheme for MANETs. Different from other schemes, each node in PTBCS determines its role by intercepting packet transmissions in the air during a special waiting period. Hence, its most remarkable advantage is that there are no periodical packet transmissions specially for backbone construction. The property that the nodes selected by PTBCS make up a connected dominating set (CDS) of the network is proven with several ideal assumptions. Simulation results show that PTBCS is effective when compared with some other typical backbone construction schemes. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.