An Adaptive Approach to Topology Management in Large and Dense Real-Time Wireless Sensor Networks

Topology management protocols play an important role in WSNs, managing the sleep transitions of the nodes to make data transmissions occur in an energy-efficient way, thus prolonging network lifetime. However, classical topology management protocols are not suitable for real-time WSNs, as they may introduce unbounded delays. In a previous work, we presented a static topology management protocol specifically designed for real-time WSNs which is able to provide bounded delay and routing fidelity. This paper extends such work, presenting a dynamic topology management protocol that surpasses the static approach introducing support for event-driven data transmissions and node joining at runtime and providing a novel adaptive technique for energy balancing among nodes to further increase network lifetime. This paper provides a detailed description of the dynamic protocol and simulation results on network lifetime and routing performance with comparative assessments.