a-kTC: Integrating topology control into the stack

Topology control for wireless sensor networks is a thriving research field with no real-world adoption. This is partly due to the fact that a large number of approaches is focused on providing theoretical bounds. However, even more recent practical approaches are not being implemented. Integrating topology control with medium access control (MAC) and routing into a standard communication stack seems to be a non-trivial challenge. Some experts even doubt real-world efficiency gains. In this paper, we present asynchronous kTC (a-kTC). It builds upon the kTC topology control approach and integrates the protocol into the standard Contiki communication stack. We report up to 16% reduction in overall energy consumption in the testbed for many-to-one and all-to-all communication. This is the first topology control evaluation indicating real-world reductions in total energy consumption.