A Simulation Study on the Strong Neighborhood-based Stable Connected Dominating Sets for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

We present a detailed simulation based performance study of our recently proposed strong-neighborhood based connected dominating sets (SN-CDS) for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). We compare the performance of SN-CDS with that of the well-known minimum connected dominating sets (MCDS) and the ID-based connected dominating sets (ID-CDS) for MANETs. We show that by computing the SN-CDS involving links that are only within 90% of the maximum transmission range of the nodes, we are able to significantly improve the stability of the CDS (as large as 250%), compared to the MCDS strategy of choosing the minimum number of nodes to cover the entire network. An SN-CDS requires only at most 20% more nodes and has the potential to consume only at most 25% more energy compared to that of a MCDS. On the other hand, the ID-CDS requires 40-70% more nodes and has the potential to consume as large as 140% more energy compared to that of a MCDS. The diameter of an SN-CDS is at most 10% more than that of a MCDS, and the hop count per source-destination path (between any two randomly chosen network nodes) involving the CDS nodes as intermediate nodes is about the same for both the SNCDS and MCDS. Thus, the SN-CDS effectively balances the stability-node size tradeoff and is significantly more stable than that of a MCDS, only at the cost of a minimal to moderate increase in the other performance metrics.