22 Int. J. Engineering Systems Modelling and Simulation, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2015 Copyright © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Connected dominating set for wireless ad hoc networks: a survey Anil Kumar Yadav* and Rama Shankar Yadav Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Pin-211004, Allahabad, India Email: yadanil@gmail.com Email: rsy@mnnit.ac.in *Corresponding author Raghuraj Singh Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Harcourt Butler Technological Institute, Pin-208002, Kanpur, India Email: rscse@rediffmail.com Ashutosh Kumar Singh Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Pin-211012, Allahabad, India Email: ashutosh_singh@iiita.ac.in Abstract: In wireless ad hoc networks, there is no predefined infrastructure and nodes can communicate with each other via relaying the messages through intermediate nodes. The ad hoc network has found a variety of military and civil applications such as battlefield communication, disaster recoveries, conferences, environmental detection, security, pollution sensing and traffic monitoring. Connected dominating sets (CDS) can be regarded as a virtual backbone for wireless ad hoc network and a smaller CDS is designed to minimise the interference problem, control messages and maintenance cost. The objective of designing a CDS heuristic is to reduce the search space to save scarce resources such as bandwidth energy. We discuss few centralised algorithms that have constant performance ratios for its size. We also discuss few algorithms of distributed and localised type. Further, we compare various CDS algorithms in terms of performance ratio, time complexity, message complexity with their merits and demerits and are illustrated in Table 2. Keywords: graph theory; wireless ad hoc network; QoS; topology; energy management. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Yadav, A.K., Yadav, R.S., Singh, R. and Singh, A.K. (2015) ‘Connected dominating set for wireless ad hoc networks: a survey’, Int. J. Engineering Systems Modelling and Simulation, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp.22–34. Biographical notes: Anil Kumar Yadav is currently working as a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India. His research interests are wireless ad hoc networks and algorithms. Rama Shankar Yadav is working as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India. His research interests are in the areas of distributed system, real-time system and computer networks. He has published number of papers in reputed international journals and conferences. Raghuraj Singh is working as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Harcourt Butler Technological Institute, Kanpur, India. His research interests are in the field of software engineering, computer networks and soft computing. He has guided several MTech and PhD candidates. He has published a number of papers in reputed international journals and conferences.