Routing through Backbone Structures in Sensor Networks

Virtual infrastructures or backbones in wireless sensor networks reduce the communication overhead and energy consumption. In this paper, we present backbone routing (BBR), a novel fully distributed protocol for construction and rotation of backbone networks. BBR reduces energy consumption without significantly diminishing the capacity or connectivity of the network. Another key feature of BBR is its energy balancing nature by distributing the role of being backbone node among all the nodes. BBR builds on the observation that when a region of a shared-channel wireless network has a sufficient density of nodes, only a small number of them need be on at any time to forward traffic for active connections. Improvement in system lifetime due to BBR increases as the ratio of idle-to-sleep energy consumption increases, and increases as the density of the network increases. Our experiments show that BBR is more efficient in saving energy and extending network life without deteriorating network performance when compared with 802.11