WSNs: Algorithmic Aspects of Topology Control and Maintenance

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of devices equipped with radio transceivers that cooperate to form and maintain a fully connected network of sensor nodes. WSNs do not have a fixed infrastructure and do not use centralized methods for organization. Because of their unique structure, and limited energy storage, computational and memory resources, many of the existing protocols and algorithms designed for wired or wireless ad hoc networks cannot be directly used in WSNs. It is expected that topology control techniques will play an important role in managing the complexity of such highly complicated and distributed systems through self organization capabilities. Topology issues have received more and more attentions in WSNs. While, WSNs applications are normally optimized by the given underlying network topology, another trend is to optimize WSNs by means of topology control and is composed of two mechanisms, Topology Construction (TC) and Topology Maintenance (TM). TC controls the topology, while maintaining characteristics like queue size, energy consumption and data transfer. It is very important for a network to work with low energy consumption, better coverage (queue size) with full efficient data transfer rate. In this paper a comparative study of A3, A3-Coverage (A3-Cov), Just tree and Simple tree algorithm have been discussed with results in terms of queue size, energy consumption and data transfer.