Location-Aided Topology Discovery for Wireless Sensor Networks

Topology discovery in sensor network is useful in any practical deployment of the network. Topology information helps the administrators monitor, debug and perform proactive control and management obtaining topology for dense wireless sensor network is expensive due to limited bandwidth and contention for the wireless channel. In this paper, we consider the problem of efficiently obtaining network topology where the locations and associated node identifiers are known by the central controller (sink). Although the locations of the nodes are known, the connectivity between any two nodes cannot be determined by distance information alone due to irregular radio coverage and obstacles. We propose a location-aided topology discovery algorithm (LAD) that requires O(log(|M|)) data units per node in common cases, and O(|M|) data units per node in the worst case, where M is the set of directly communicable neighbors of a particular node. Simulation results show that the overhead reduction ranges from 70% to over 95%.