The connected dominating set (CDS) principle has emerged as the predominant method for energy-efficient discovery and clustering of power-/location-unaware WSN nodes. While many CDS discovery protocols have been proposed recently, a one-to-one comparative evaluation of these protocols has not been performed on judicious metrics. In this paper, we perform a simulation-based evaluation of three prominent CDS based protocols (CDS Rule K, EECDS and A3) on the basis of message and energy overhead, residual energy, number of unconnected nodes, and convergence time. Our analysis shows that the protocols’ performances vary significantly with different maintenance techniques and none of the existing protocols can outperform the others on all metrics. Based on this result, we identify some performance-improving guidelines for CDS-based topology discovery and utilize them to propose a new protocol, clique-based CDS discovery (CCDS). We show that CCDS provides considerably better performance than existing protocols in most operational scenarios.
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