Transmission Range Assignment for Backbone Connectivity in Clustered Wireless Networks

In this paper, a method is proposed to assign minimum transmission ranges to the backbone nodes of a hierarchically structured multihop network, while seeking an M% probability to have end-to-end connectivity to the network's data sink. The target scenario is data collection in which cluster head (CH) nodes collect packets from cluster members and then forward them over a CH-backbone towards the sink. The proposed method reduces the energy consumption of data transmissions made by CH nodes, and hence improves the efficiency of existing node clustering protocols, which select arbitrarily large ranges for backbone communications.