CDS based reliable topology control in WSNs

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become increasingly popular in recent years for controlling systems where human intervention is undesirable or impossible. There is no fixed or planned infrastructure for WSNs. Therefore, Virtual Backbone (VB) is currently used to support topology control, efficient routing and broadcast communication in WSNs. A Connected Dominating Set (CDS) is a promising candidate solution for constructing a VB stimulated by different characteristics of WSNs. To the best of our knowledge; all related work employ heuristic and/or meta-heuristic optimizations for formulating CDSs in WSNs by considering contradictory design features. However; no work reported that tackles with the data reliability of WSN while formulating the CDS. The main contribution of this paper is to address the reliability problem of WSN where the topology is controlled by CDS using a probabilistic network model (PNM). The existing work on CDS considers only reliability among dominators regardless of dominatees reliability. We considered both dominators and dominatees reliability to improve overall reliability of the network. The network model used in this paper is more realistic compared to previous work by employing uncertainty measure, probabilistic parameters and Euclidean distance between the source and destination. We first aim to study how to formulate and maintain an Evolutionary based - CDS considering the main design features of WSNs, i.e. reliability and energy efficiency. The performance of the protocol is evaluated by extensive simulation and compared with RMCDS-GA and Greedy area - mCDS. We found that our protocol yields better trade-off between network reliability and the size of CDS.