Construction of higher spectral efficiency virtual backbone in wireless networks

One promising solution to improve the efficiency of wireless networks is to control the number of nodes involved in multi-hop routing by employing virtual backbone. On the one hand, a virtual backbone becomes more efficient as its size is getting smaller. However, as the size of a virtual backbone is getting smaller, the throughput of the virtual backbone is degraded since the length of a routing path between a pair of nodes through the virtual backbone can be much longer than their hop distance in the original network. Due to the reason, several efforts are recently made to identify a virtual backbone including a shortest path between every pair of nodes in the original graph. In this paper, we investigate a new strategy to compute higher throughput virtual backbone in wireless networks. We employ a new information theoretic metric called spectral-efficiency by Chen et al. and propose a new virtual backbone computation algorithm in homogeneous wireless networks with some interesting theoretical analysis. Our simulation results indicate our algorithm produces a virtual backbone with higher spectral-efficiency than the existing alternatives. We also conduct another simulation using OMNet++ and show the virtual backbone produced by our algorithm has the highest throughput. 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.