EAPOR: A Distributed, Energy-Aware Topology Control Algorithm Based Path–Obstacle–Remove Model for WSN

The obstacles existing in the propagation path cause shadow fading. As a consequence, signal’s energy is additionally consumed to overcome the influence incurred by the shadow fading. This situation leads to the unpredictable communication environment in practical application. However, most topology control algorithms ignore the additional energy consumption in the process of appraising links’ communication quality. The topologies based on the ideal signal attenuation model are too ideal to meet the requirements of practical application. In order to obtain a more practical description of the real environment, we structure a new model named path–obstacle–remove model. This model aims at erasing the influence of shadow fading. Thus, it transforms the additional attenuation energy into logic distance between nodes. Besides, considering that the excessive energy consumption of lower-energy nodes restricts the network lifetime, a distributed, energy-aware topology control algorithm based on path–obstacle–remove model (EAPOR) is proposed in this paper. The theoretical analysis demonstrates that the topology constructed by EAPOR is connected and bi-directional. Besides, EAPOR can easily construct the topology with a low message complexity of O(n). The simulation result shows that EAPOR has good performance on robustness and sparseness. Moreover, EAPOR reduces the end-to-end delay and prolongs the network lifetime significantly.