Cooperative Approaches to Construction and Maintenance of Networks' Virtual Backbones for Extreme Wireless Sensor Applications

Wireless sensing technology is becoming a new scientific instrument for environmental monitoring under extreme conditions. This class of applications requires reliable, energy-efficient, and self-organizing approaches. Connected dominating sets (CDSs) have been widely used for virtual backbone construction in unstructured wireless sensor networks to control topology, facilitate routing, and extend network lifetime. This paper proposes two distributed algorithms for CDS construction and maintenance in extreme wireless sensor networks. The proposed approaches efficiently construct and maintain a small CDS for challenging environments. Simulation shows that our proposed approaches provide significant energy efficiency without introducing any performance degradation in terms of CDS size.