A novel energy-efficient backbone for sensor networks

The construction of backbone is a fundamental problem in sensor networks. As being critical to routing, data fusion and query broadcasting, the backbone should contain as fewer nodes as possible. Meanwhile, it also should be power-efficient in order to prolong its lifetime. In this paper, we propose a novel design of backbone for sensor networks by minimizing its total transmission cost. We term this kind of backbone Minimum-Weight Backbone (simply MWB). The construction of MWB is proved to be NP-Complete. Two heuristic algorithms (one is centralized and the other is distributed) are developed for constructing such backbone. The centralized algorithm, executed at the base station, is to find an optimal backbone by using the information of all nodes and links in the network. The distributed algorithm run at each node, however, uses the information of its neighbors and two-hop neighbors to determine whether it should be included in the backbone. Simulated experiments are conducted to evaluate the novel backbone, and performance comparisons are also done with the existing schemes.