Efficiently reconfigurable backbones for wireless sensor networks

We present the definition and performance evaluation of a protocol for building and maintaining a connected backbone among the nodes of a wireless sensor networks (WSN). Building backbones first, and then coping with network dynamics is typical of protocols for backbone formation. Rules for building the backbone, however, do not take into account the following network dynamics explicitly. This makes maintaining a connected backbone quite costly, especially in terms of reorganization time, overhead and energy consumption. Our protocol includes in the backbone forming operations a fail-safe mechanism for dealing with the addition and the removal of nodes, which are typical events in a WSN. More specifically, the network is kept partitioned into clusters that are cliques, i.e., nodes in each cluster are directly connected to each others. Therefore, removing a node does not disrupt a cluster, and adding one requires simple operations for checking node admission to the cluster. The protoco...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: COMCOM
• Authors: Stefano Basagni, Chiara Petrioli, Roberto Petroccia
• Keywords: Backbone Forming Operations, COMCOM 2008, Connected Backbone, Network Dynamics