A Topology Control Approach Reducing Construction Cost for Lossy Wireless Sensor Networks

In lossy wireless sensor networks, many links suffer from significant quality variation with time and environments. Topology control approaches need to consider such stochastic nature to yield different topologies for different application requirements. However, the metric of links must be timely obtained to speed up the topology construction. In fact, the existing approaches address it by passive monitoring, which is not timely adaptive to link quality variation. Also, timely access to the metric of all links at all power levels causes a large burden on topology control operation. We do not insist on getting the link metrics of all power levels at a time. Most urgently needed link metrics are firstly obtained by an active probing mode in this paper. If these link metrics do not meet the topology performance requirements, sub-urgently needed link metrics will be obtained on demand. At the same time, each node performs a topology control process based on the information in a smaller range (e.g., 1-hop neighborhood). Therefore, our approach has the low construct cast, which is proved in this paper. The simulation results also show that our approach outperforms the existing typical works in terms of average transmission power level, though it is slightly less efficient in terms of average delivery rate, average end-to-end delay and total energy consumption. In addition, our approach has advantage in terms of standard deviation of remaining energy under the relatively smaller required path quality bound or lower node density.