New Approximation for Minimum-Weight Routing Backbone in Wireless Sensor Network

Ning Zhang, Incheol Shin, Bo Li, Cem Boyaci, Ravi Tiwari, My T. Thai

Abstract: Our problem formulation is as follows. Given a weighted disk graph G where the weight of edge represents the transmission energy consumption, we wish to determine a dominating tree T of G such that the total weight of edges in T is minimized. To the best of our knowledge, this problem have not been addressed in the literature. Solving the dominating tree problem can yield a routing backbone for broadcast protocols since: (1) each node does not have to construct their own broadcast tree, (2) utilize the virtual backbone to reduce the message overhead, and (3) the weight of backbone is minimized. Our contributions to this problem is multi-fold: First, the paper is the first to study this problem, prove the hardness of this problem and propose an approximation framework. Second, we present a heuristic to approximate the solution with low time complexity. Third, a distributed algorithm is provided for practical implementation. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of our proposal through simulation.