Receiver-based Backbone Construction and Maintenance for Wireless Sensor or Multi-Hop Networks

Energy savings and topology control are needed tasks of many sensor network applications. Sensors are assumed to be randomly deployed and shall organize themselves independently after deployment. Moreover, sensor networks shall operate as long as possible warranting network connectivity. To support these tasks we propose the maintenance of a virtual backbone. Nodes not participating in the backbone shutdown their radios and go to sleep for a certain time. The backbone nodes are adaptively altered according to the current network conditions. The backbone is thus able to deal with node failures and/or movements. The non-backbone nodes follow long sleep cycles during which they frequently wake up to check the network conditions. After a long sleep period the backbone is reestablished by the base station. The algorithm shows good approximation of the minimum number of nodes in the backbone after backbone setup, as well as the ability to repair link breaks on demand with short delays and low message overhead.