Connected Dominating Sets (CDS) has been proposed as the virtual backbone to alleviate the broadcasting storm problem and perform some other tasks such as data gathering in wireless sensor networks.Many previous researches mainly focus on how to construct a small virtual backbone for high efficient data gathering

which is modeled as the Minimum Connected Dominating Set (MCDS) problem.However

the MCDS cannot balance the energy consumptions among nodes

which shorten the network lifetime.Therefore

it is desirable to construct an energy-balanced CDS.In this paper

a novel distributed schema

called EBCDS (Energy-Balanced Connected Dominating Set

s) algorithm is proposed to balance the energy consumption of the network and enlarge the network lifetime.In EBCDS

each node in the CDS has high energy and large degree

and these nodes form a virtual backbone in the network.By transmitting data through the backbone with small routing space

each node can preserve its energy effectively.Moreover

the nodes in the backbone would not die quickly because of lacking of energy.Theoretical analyses show that EBCDS can construct a CDS with

O

(

n

log

n

) message complexity

and simulations results prove the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in terms of energy consumption and network lifetime.