Energy efficiency is one of the major issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and their applications. Distributed techniques with low message and time complexities are expected in WSNs. Connected dominating sets (CDSs) have been widely used for virtual backbone construction in WSNs to control topology, facilitate routing, and extend network lifetime. Most of the existing CDS approaches suffer from a very poor approximation ratio, high time, and message complexities. This paper proposes two

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... el approaches for CDS distributed construction in WSNs. The proposed approaches are intended to construct a small CDS as well as allowing energy-efficient CDS construction and maintenance in WSNs. Simulation shows that our distributed approaches have an approximation factor of 7.5 to the optimal CDS. This approximation outperforms the existing distributed CDS construction algorithms.