A Virtual Backbone Construction Heuristic for Maximizing the Lifetime of Dual-Radio Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, the major challenge in the design of wireless sensor networks is to enhance the network lifetime. Many researchers have studied the problem of constructing virtual backbones, which are the backbones used for different time periods, in order to prolong the network lifetime. In this paper, we study the problem of constructing virtual backbones in dual-radio wireless sensor networks to maximize the network lifetime, where each sensor is equipped with two radio interfaces, including small-range and large-range radio. In addition, the backbone nodes can use small-range or large-range radio to maintain the backbone, and the remaining nodes use small-range radio to connect to the backbone to transmit the sensed data. Simulation results show that the proposed method provides good performance.