Backbone Construction for Heterogeneous Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we propose a backbone construction scheme over heterogeneous ad hoc networks, where the network nodes have different characteristics such as communication capacity, processing power and energy resource. Most of the wireless backbone construction techniques focus on minimizing the number of backbone nodes. In our proposed scheme, we not only minimize the backbone size, but also take the characteristics of nodes into account when building a backbone. In the scheme, the more capable nodes have higher probability to serve as backbone nodes and provide a wireless highway over which end-to-end communication can take place. The proposed scheme includes two major steps, which can be solved by formulating as a Dominating Set (DS) problem and a Steiner Tree Problem with Minimum Number of Steiner Points (STP-MSP) respectively. We focus on the two subproblems and present a number of polynomial time approximation algorithms. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves higher average backbone node performance, while has approximately the same backbone size comparing with other schemes.