Abstract
As the energy consumption in wireless sensor nodes is dominated by the radio transmission circuitry, the network configuration must be designed to minimize the power consumption by transmission radios. Sensor nodes are generally equipped with short-range radios that require low power consumption. But the current technology allows each node to adjust its transmission power. In this paper, we consider the dual power radios in which the radio of each node can be assigned high- or low-power during the network initializing stage. Our primary goal in such an assignment is to minimize the overall power consumption by radios to maximize the network lifetime while maintaining the full network connectivity, the most fundamental network functionality. Using a graph-theoretic approach, we formulate the problem as a "minimum subgraph" problem, show its NP-completeness, establish upper and lower bounds on the optimum solution, and present a near-optimal heuristic algorithm and simulation results.