Topology Maintenance: Extending the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks

Topology Maintenance is the part of Topology Control dedicated to the periodical restoration of the network topology, in order to guarantee characteristics like connectivity and coverage. This article presents one of the first efforts to formalize this concept by presenting a taxonomy for different strategies to perform topology maintenance in wireless sensor networks, including static, dynamic and hybrid techniques, with global and local scope, and using different triggering criteria. In addition, a comparison is included to evaluate, in sparse and dense networks, the performance of global static, dynamic and hybrid techniques, with triggering criteria based on time and energy, and working jointly with the two well-known topology construction protocols A3 and CDS-Rule-K. The results show that the dynamic techniques always produce benefits in terms of extending the network lifetime, while static and hybrid techniques produce mixed results (worst and best), depending mainly on the nature of the construction protocols used.