A Metaheuristic Algorithm for Vertex Cover based Link Monitoring and Backbone Formation in Wireless Ad hoc Networks

Wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs) are infrastructureless networks and are used in various applications such as habitat monitoring, military surveillance, and disaster relief. Data transmission is achieved through radio packet transfer, thus it is prone to various attacks such as eavesdropping, spoofing, and etc. Monitoring the communication links by secure points (monitors) is an essential precaution against these attacks. Also, deploying monitors provides a virtual backbone for multi-hop data transmission. However, adding secure points to a WANET can be costly in terms of price and time, so minimizing the number of secure points is of utmost importance. Graph theory provides a great foundation to tackle the emerging problems in WANETs. A vertex cover (VC) is a set of vertices where every edge is incident to at least one vertex. The minimum weighted connected VC (MWCVC) problem can be defined as finding the VC of connected nodes having the minimum total weight. MWCVC is a very suitable infrastructure for energy-efficient link monitoring and virtual backbone formation. In this paper, we propose a novel metaheuristic algorithm for MWCVC construction in WANETs. Our algorithm is a population-based iterated greedy (PBIG) approach that is very effective against graph theoretical problems. We explain the idea of the algorithm and illustrate its operation through sample examples. We implement the proposed algorithm with its competitors on a widely used dataset. From extensive measurements, we obtain that the algorithm produces WCVC with less weight at the same time its monitor count and time performances are reasonable.