A topology control strategy addressing for high scalability and low energy demands in large scale wireless sensor networks

The increasing usage of wireless sensor networks in large scale and safety critical monitoring applications scenarios exacerbates their well known energy and scalability limitations. Organizing the network in clusters is what the most of the existing solutions propose to dominate network complexity, as well as to define quality of service policies in charge of fitting application requirements. However, this demands for an extra effort in terms of network setup and circulating messages among nodes which have a non negligible impact on energy consumption at network level. This work improves the state of the art in the field of communication protocols for clustered networks by proposing a new topology control and recovery mechanism which exhibits low energy demands. This aims to let randomly deployed sensors to self organize in a well constructed topology, as well as to repair the network from potential crashes. The existence of a path from any sensor to the sink, composed only by cluster heads, is guaranteed thus further reducing the energy consumption. The simulation tests show encouraging results even in the case of very large and dense networks.