On the Construction and Maintenance of Virtual Backbone for Wireless Sensor Networks

A virtual backbone plays an important role for routing and connectivity management in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm to construct and maintain a virtual backbone to mitigate the unevenness of energy distribution and its undesirable effects like reduced network lifetime and loss of connectivity for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The construction of virtual backbone is based on the maximal weighted independent set (MWIS) and rooted tree. A distributed procedure is presented to maintain the virtual backbone when the network topology changes. Theoretical analysis and experiment show that our proposed approach can effectively extend the lifetime of the network, and at the same time, it bears the characteristics of energy efficiency and low complexity.