Dual power assignment for network connectivity in wireless sensor networks

Strong connectivity has been an important feature explored in many network applications, such as sensor networks. This research focuses on a dual power assignment problem, where each sensor node has two transmission power levels. The objective is to minimize the number of wireless sensor nodes assigned to transmit messages at the high transmission power level, while the resulting sensor network is strongly connected. We propose an efficient 1.75-approximation algorithm for this challenging problem. We not only show that the approximation ratio of the proposed algorithm is tight but also demonstrate the capability of the proposed algorithm in terms of simulation experiments