A Topology Control Method for Multi-path Wireless Sensor Networks

Future sensor networks will be consisted of large number of untethered and unattended sensors. Energy efficiency and load balance will be two important design issues for these networks. Some researches [2] [3] have found that topology control, which changes the set of neighbors of some nodes in the networks, can be used to improve the energy efficiency and load balance. In this paper, we take link reliability and multi-path into consideration when designing topology control algorithms. Based on an analytical link loss model [8], the relationship of energy efficiency, load balance and number of neighbors is analyzed. We found that there is a contradiction in improving energy efficiency and load balance at the same time. A layered topology control method LELBM (Layered Energy-efficient and Load Balance Method) is proposed to adjusting network’s topology for increasing energy efficiency and meanwhile getting good load balance. Analysis and simulation show that this method can significantly improve the network’s performance.