Low-Cost Topology Control for Data Collecting in Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

Data collection is an essential operation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Topology control and duty-cycle are two popular schemes in WSNs to improve the utilization of various network resource. The problem of low-cost topology control in duty-cycle wireless sensor networks is investigated in this paper. Due to each sensor's awake/sleep schedule, the topological graphs in duty-cycle WSNs are changed over time. A space-time graph model is presented to describe the dynamics of a series of topological graphs. The new topology control problem in a spacetime graph is defined, and then two heuristic algorithms are proposed to find the low-cost topological structures, in which the connectivity from each sensor to the sink is maintained. Simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.