On Generating Backbone Trees through Robust Multi-hop Clusters in Wireless Sensor Networks

Routing through a backbone, which is responsible for performing and managing multipoint communication, reduces the communication overhead and overall energy consumption in wireless sensor networks. However, the backbone nodes will need extra functionality and therefore consume more energy compared to the other nodes. The unbalanced power consumption among sensor nodes may cause a network partition and failures. Hence optimal construction of the backbone is one of the pivotal problems in sensor network applications. In this paper a distributed algorithm is proposed to generate backbone trees through robust multi-hop clusters in wireless sensor networks. The main objective is to form a properly designed backbone through multi-hop clusters by considering energy level and degree of each node. Comprehensive computer simulations have indicated that the newly proposed scheme gives approximately 58.6% and 79.42% improvements in the performances related to the residual energy level and the degree of the cluster heads respectively.