Energy-aware backbone formation in military multilayer ad hoc networks

Abstract

Ad hoc networks designed for deployment in modern battlefields need to take care of traditional requirements related to their backbone's size, their energy efficiency, their scalability in terms of network size, but also of their nature which allows for combining networks of different units that act altogether towards a common operational goal. This article develops a distributed algorithm for developing an energy-aware backbone for military ad hoc network composed of multiple layers, namely E2CLB. The algorithm is based on the concepts of connected dominating sets and also on node centrality concepts, and results as a heuristic solution to the problem of calculating a maximum energy, minimum connected dominating set for a multilayer network by including into the dominating set those nodes which are highly connected to their and other layers (i.e., they have large centrality value) and moreover they are energy-rich. The computation and communication complexities of the algorithm are analyzed, and a thorough simulation-based evaluation of it against six competitors is presented. The results show that E2CLB is either the best performing algorithm across the examined performance measures or it is able to trade a very small increase in the size of the backbone's network in order to reap improved performance in the energy realm. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.