An Energy Efficient Topology Control Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor network doesn't have any infrastructure and also is energy constrained network composing hundreds or thousands nodes. These characteristics cause sensor nodes themselves to efficiently organize network topology with the purpose maximizing the lifetime of network. Topology Control is one of the most important techniques in wireless sensor networks to reduce energy consumption and to prevent interference among communicating nodes. This technique is performed by adjusting the transmission power of each sensor node while guaranteeing the original connectivity with other nodes. In this paper, we propose the topology control protocol which doesn't use the location information of nodes and depend on the radio propagation model like prior works by proving actual transmission power between sensor nodes to be feasible in real applications. We also consider the potential problem in topology control scheme which can be occurred in the case where network traffic is converged on particular node due to transmission power control. Finally, we mathematically prove that our proposed topology control protocol increases the lifetime of network while guaranteeing the network connectivity among sensor nodes.