Fault-Tolerant Topology Control for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper addresses fault-tolerant topology control in a heterogeneous wireless sensor network consisting of several resource-rich supernodes used for data relaying and a large number of energy constrained wireless sensor nodes. We introduce the fc-degree Anycast Topology Control (fc-ATC) problem with the objective of selecting each sensor´s transmission range such that each sensor is fc-vertex supernode connected and the maximum sensor transmission power is minimized. Such topologies are needed for applications that support sensor data reporting even in the event of failures of up to k-1 sensor nodes. We propose two solutions for the k-ATC problem: a greedy centralized algorithm that produces the optimal solution and a distributed and localized algorithm that incrementally adjusts sensors´ transmission range such that the k-vertex supernode connectivity requirement is met. Simulation results are presented to verify our approaches.