A Greedy Heuristic for Maximizing the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Disjoint Weighted Dominating Sets

Dominating sets are among the most well-studied concepts in graph theory, with many real-world applications especially in the area of wireless sensor networks. One way to increase network lifetime in wireless sensor networks consists of assigning sensors to disjoint dominating node sets, which are then sequentially used by a sleep–wake cycling mechanism. This paper presents a greedy heuristic for solving a weighted version of the maximum disjoint dominating sets problem for energy conservation purposes in wireless sensor networks. Moreover, an integer linear programming model is presented. Experimental results based on a large set of 640 problem instances show, first, that the integer linear programming model is only useful for small problem instances. Moreover, they show that our algorithm outperforms recent local search algorithms from the literature with respect to both solution quality and computation time.