A new performance metric for construction of robust and efficient wireless backbone network

With the popularity of wireless devices and the increasing demand of network applications, it is emergent to develop more effective communications paradigm to enable new and powerful pervasive applications, and to allow services to be accessed anywhere, at anytime. However, it is extremely challenging to construct efficient and reliable networks to connect wireless devices due to the increasing communications need and the dynamic nature of wireless communications. In order to improve transmission throughput, many efforts have been made in recent years to reduce traffic and hence transmission collisions by constructing backbone networks with the minimum size. However, many other important issues need to be considered. Instead of simply minimizing the number of backbone nodes or supporting some isolated network features, in this work, we exploit the use of algebraic connectivity to control backbone network topology design for concurrent improvement of backbone network robustness, capacity, stability and routing efficiency. In order to capture other network features, we provide a general cost function and introduce a new metric, connectivity efficiency, to trade off algebraic connectivity and cost for backbone construction. We formally prove the problem of formulating a backbone network with the maximum connectivity efficiency that is NP-hard, and design both centralized and distributed algorithms to build more robust and efficient backbone infrastructure to better support the application needs. We have made extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of our work. Compared to literature studies on constructing wireless backbone networks, the incorporation of algebraic connectivity into the network performance metric could achieve much higher throughput and delivery ratio, and much lower end-to-end delay and routing distances under all test scenarios. We hope our work could stimulate more future research in designing more reliable and efficient networks. Our performance studies demonstrate that, compared to peer work, the incorporation of algebraic connectivity into network performance metric could achieve much higher throughput and delivery ratio, and much lower end-to-end delay and routing distances under all test scenarios. We hope our work could stimulate more future research in designing more reliable and efficient networks.