A Distributed Topology Control Method for Improving Energy Efficiency of Wireless Sensor Networks

We present a distributed topology control method
that builds a virtual backbone in a wireless sensor network
(WSN). It aims to reduce the communication overhead in the
network. The method is based on the Connected Dominating
Set (CDS) concept, which takes energy reserves of the individual nodes into consideration when constructing the virtual backbone. To achieve this, we have developed a novel algorithm called three phase
single initiator (TPSI). By using the TPSI algorithm, our
method can build the virtual backbone in a fully distributed
manner using localized information. It creates a small-size
backbone, has low message overhead, and ensures that only the nodes with sufficient energy capacity are selected. It also allows the energy-exhausted nodes in the backbone to be replaced with new ones. Simulation results show that our algorithm performs better than the two leading distributed CDS algorithms with respect to the size of the backbone, message overhead and energyefficiency.