Dominating set based virtual backbones are used for rou-ting in wireless ad-hoc networks. Such backbones receive and transmit messages from/to every node in the network. Existing distributed algorithms only consider undirected graphs, which model symmetric networks with uniform transmission ranges. We are particularly interested in the well-established disk graphs, which model asymmetric networks with non-uniform transmission ranges. The corresponding graph theoretic problem seeks a strongly connected dominating-absorbent set of minimum cardinality in a digraph. A subset of nodes in a digraph is a strongly connected dominating-absorbent set if the subgraph induced by these nodes is strongly connected and each node in the graph is either in the set or has both an in-neighbor and an out-neighbor in it. We introduce the first distributed algorithm for this problem in disk graphs. The algorithm gives an \(O(k^4)\)-approximation ratio and has a runtime bound of \(O(Diam)\) where \(Diam\) is the diameter of the graph and \(k\) denotes the transmission ratio \(r_{max}/r_{min}\) with \(r_{max}\) and \(r_{min}\) being the maximum and minimum transmission range, respectively. Moreover, we apply our algorithm on the subgraph of disk graphs consisting of only bidirectional edges. Our algorithm gives an \(O(\ln k)\)-approximation and a runtime bound of \(O(k^8 \log ^*n)\), which, for bounded \(k\), is an optimal approximation for the problem, following Lenzen and Wattenhofer’s \(\varOmega (\log ^*n)\) runtime lower bound for distributed constant approximation in disk graphs.