Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	Topology Control of Wireless Sensor Networks Under an Average Degree Constraint
Authors	CHEN Li-Jun1),2) MAO Ying-Chi1),2) CHEN Dao-Xu1),2) XIE Li1),2)
Address	1)(State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093) 2)(The Cooperative Laboratory for Mobile and Wireless Sensor Networks of Nanjing University and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Nanjing 210093)
Year	2007
Issue	No.9(1544—1550)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract Topology control is one of the most important technologies in wireless sensor networks. In the precondition of the topology connectivity of wireless sensor networks, how to solve the sparseness of the network topology is a very important problem in a large number of sensor nodes deployed randomly. Existing topology control schemes show that network topology is complex and routing process consumes the resources heavily. This paper presents the topology control of wireless sensor networks under an average degree constraint. With increasing communication radius and constraining node degree, the inconsistency of network topology connectivity and sparseness can be solved. The simulation and analysis study demonstrate that proposed scheme can decrease working nodes, guarantee network topology sparseness, predigest routing complexity and prolong network survival period. keywords wireless sensor networks; random graph; average degree; constraint; topology control background Wireless sensor networks have attracted a great deal of research attention due to their wide range of potential application. Topology control is one of the most important techniques in wireless sensor networks. If the topology is too sparse, there is a danger of network partitioning and high end-to-end delays. On the other hand, if the topology is too dense, the limited spatial reuse reduces network capacity. Wireless sensor networks that do not employ topology control are likely to result in degraded performance, or even disrupted connectivity. The specific problem we consider has not studied previously. Many researchers addressed topology control with the approach of using transmitting power adjustment. The idea is to adjust node transmit power in response to topological changes and attempt to maintain a connected topology. Although the solution can show that reachability between any two nodes is guaranteed to be the same as the maximum topology and nodal transmission range is minimized to cover the least number of surrounding nodes. However, they do not consider any techniques for actually controlling the sparseness of topology of networks, nor do they concern themselves with connectivity. This paper presents the topology control of wireless sensor networks under an average degree constraint. With increasing communication radius and constraining node degree, the inconsistency of network topology connectivity and sparseness can be solved. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No.60573132. The project title is "Topology Control Based on the Theory of Complex Networks in Wireless Sensor Networks". Complex networks are currently being studied across many fields of science, the discovery of small world and scale free properties of many natural and artificial complex networks has stimulated a great deal of interest in studying the underlying principles of various complex networks, which has led to dramatic advances in this emerging and active field of research. The ubiquity of complex networks in science and technology has naturally led to a set of common and important research problems concerning how the network structure facilitates and constrains the network dynamical behaviors, which have largely been neglected in the studies of traditional disciplines. It is possible to derive models of wireless sensor networks based on the theory of complex networks to develop specifications for node density, network connectivity and fault-tolerant communication topologies of such networks. The paper "Evolution of Wireless Sensor Networks" has been published by IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference 2007—Networking(WCNC 2007). In that paper, the authors propose a simple evolving mechanism to deduce fault tolerant communication topology among the cluster heads. They investigated the relationship between communication connectivity and topology sparseness.