An energy-aware virtual backbone tree for wireless sensor networks

Provision of an efficient communication infrastructure is a critical task for wireless sensor networks, and Virtual backbones have been proposed as an efficient mechanism for providing this. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware virtual backbone tree (EVBT) for general-purpose communications in wireless sensor networks. The EVBT has some salient features: the overhead for constructing an EVBT is very low; the delivery of data along the tree depletes minimum energy from the network; and the tree nodes are those with high energy levels. In addition to these, the proposed algorithm is adaptive in nature - it automatically adapts to the addition and removal of the sensor nodes. The use of multiple EVBTs improves the robustness of the communications infrastructure. Simulation results are presented that demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.