Efficient Topology Discovery for Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks

The overhead of periodic routing updates in proactive routing protocols has been always the main impediment in the way of using this kind of protocols in wireless ad hoc networks specially sensor networks. In this paper, we introduce a new topology discovery protocol based on the link state approach that uses node clustering and exploits bi-directional links in order to reduce this overhead. In this protocol, only clusterheads generate routing update packets as opposed to ordinary link state protocols where all nodes do so. In addition, clusterheads remove the redundancy associated with the double inclusion of bidirectional links in these messages. Simulations show over 50% reduction in the control overhead of topology discovery compared to a regular link state routing protocol.