Interference-Aware Dynamic Algorithms for Energy-Efficient Topology Control in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

In wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, energy is a scarce resource and a considerable amount of energy is dissipated due to interference. Therefore, interference is one of the major challenges in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. It alters or disrupts a message as it is being transmitted along a channel between source and destination. Since the messages are disrupted when the interference occurs, they have to be detected and the interfered messages have to be retransmitted. In this paper, we propose central and distributed heuristic algorithms for reducing average interference in a receiver-centric interference model. In the literature, the minimum spanning tree (MST) algorithm is generally used through the interference coverage graph directly or indirectly in order to generate minimum average interference topology. Our algorithm, dynamic average interference (DAI), however, generates lower average interference as well as more sparse topology than MST. We realized that if the transmission ranges of nodes are taken into consideration at each stage of the topology control algorithm, the interference of links are changed dynamically. This interference changing enables up to 22% more energy saving than the MST algorithm. Thus, DAI provides energy saving by reducing the interference as far as possible in generated topology.