Navigation Route based Stable Connected Dominating Set for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Forming a virtual backbone has been always a significant technique for ad hoc networks to achieve high efficiency in various applications, including mobility management, broadcast based information dissemination, etc. This is especially true for Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET), because most of VANET applications rely on broadcasting messages. Among others, constructing the Connected Dominating Set (CDS) is a popular approach to forming virtual backbone in ad hoc networks, including VANETs. Although quite a lot of work has been done on CDS algorithms for ad hoc networks, almost all existing algorithms focus on minimizing the size of CDS, i.e. the number of nodes in CDS. In this paper, the authors consider to improve the stability of CDS, i.e. to reduce the changes of CDS during the runtime of a VANET. By making use of vehicle navigation route, the authors propose a new metric to selecting CDS node with high stability. Then, based on the new metric the authors design a CDS algorithm, which can construct a CDS with higher stability than the CDS by existing algorithms. Such advantage is validated via extensive simulations.