Joint Range and Load Considerations for Topology Control in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless ad hoc networks are usually composed of tiny and resource constraint devices, which make energy conservation a vital concern of their design. Reducing energy consumption has been addressed through different aspects till now. Topology control (TC) is a well-known approach which tries to assign the transmission ranges of nodes to optimize energy utilization while keeping some network properties like connectivity. However, in current TC schemes, the transmission range of each node is mostly accounted as the exclusive estimator for its energy consumption, while ignoring the amount of data it sends or relays. In this paper, we redefine the problem of topology control regarding both traffic load and transmission range parameters. After proving the NP-hardness of the new problem, we mathematically formulate it as a mixed integer linear programming problem to find the optimal solutions. Then, we introduce two polynomial-time heuristic algorithms to practically solve the problem. Finally, we show the advantages of our proposals through simulations