Topology Control Algorithms: a qualitative study during the sensor networks life

The goal of the self-organization is to structure the wireless sensor networks (WSN) using a connected logical topology (backbone) or a non connected one (clusters) in order to introduce stability and robustness. More, networking protocols based on such virtual structures should lead to better performances than the classical flat approach. A lot of studies deal with performance evaluations of virtual topologies in terms of energy consumption, cardinality, etc. But the network is mainly assumed fully deployed. In our point of view, a more accurate analysis should be done in order to characterize self-organization strategies during the different steps of the WSN life. We propose to study the robustness, the latency and the cardinality of the main self-organization strategies: i) dominant-based strategies which select a subset of nodes as dominants, ii) link-pruning strategies which select all the nodes and a subset of links. We study the evolution of these schemes during the chaotic deployment of the network (birth phase), the working life and the death of nodes.