A Novel Approximation for Multi-hop Connected Clustering Problem in Wireless Sensor Networks

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Jun Li, Xudong Zhu, Xiaofeng Gao, Fan Wu, Guihai Chen, Ding-Zhu Du, Shaojie Tang

Published: 2015, Last Modified: 21 Jan 2026ICDCS 2015EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in plenty of applications. To achieve higher efficiency for data collection, WSNs are often partitioned into several disjointed clusters, each with a representative cluster head in charge of the data gathering and routing process. Such a partition is balanced and effective if the distance between each node and its cluster head can be bounded within a constant number of hops, and any two cluster heads are connected. Finding such a cluster partition with minimum number of clusters and connectors between cluster heads is defined as minimum connected d-hop dominating set (d-MCDS) problem, which is proved to be NP-complete. In this paper, we propose a distributed approximation algorithm, named CS-Cluster, to address the d-MCDS problem. CS-Cluster constructs a sparser d-hop maximal independent set (d-MIS), connects the d-MIS and finally checks and removes redundant nodes. We prove the approximation ratio of CS-Cluster is (2d + l)λ, where λ is a parameter related with d but is no more than 18.4. Compared with the previous best result O(d2), our approximation ratio is a great improvement. Our evaluation results demonstrate the outstanding performance of our algorithm compared with previous works.