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The Internet of Battlefield Things is a newly born cyberphysical system and, even though it shares a lot with the Internet of Things and with ad hoc networking, substantial research is required to cope with its scale and peculiarities. This article examines a fundamental problem pertaining to the routing of information, i.e., the calculation of a backbone network. We model an IoBT network as a network with multiple layers and employ the concept of domination for multilayer networks. This is a significant departure from earlier works, and in spite of the huge literature on the topic during the past twenty years, the problem in IoBT networks is different since these networks are multilayer networks, thus making inappropriate all the past, related literature because it deals with single layer (flat) networks. We establish the computational complexity of our problem, and design a distributed algorithm for computing connected dominating sets with small cardinality. We analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm on generated topologies, and compare it against two—the only existing—competitors. The proposed algorithm establishes itself as the clear winner in all experiments concerning the dominating set from a size-wise and an energy-wise perspective achieving a performance gain of about 15%.

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