An undirected graph can be represented by G(V,E) where V is the set of vertices and E is the set of edges connecting vertices. The problem of finding a vertex cover (VC) is to identify a set of vertices VC such that at least one endpoint of every edge in E is incident to a vertex V in VC. Vertex cover is a very important graph theoretical structure for various types of communication networks such as wireless sensor networks, since VC can be used for link monitoring, clustering, backbone formation and data aggregation management. In this chapter, we will define vertex cover and related problems with their applications on communication networks and we will survey some important distributed algorithms on this research area.
Delay efficient sleep scheduling in wireless sensor networks