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.