Distributed Fault-Tolerant Topology Control in Cooperative Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Current researches on topology control with cooperative communication (CC) in wireless ad hoc networks have focused on network connectivity, path energy-efficiency and node transmission power reduction. However, fault-tolerance related issues have not been adequately addressed. In this paper, we propose a CC-based scheme to achieve more efficient fault-tolerant topology control. We first define k-connectivity under the CC model and then design a distributed scheme for building a t-spanner with k-connectivity of an arbitrary communication network. Simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme can tolerate node failures as well as exploit the advantage of CC to achieve path energy-efficiency and lower power consumption of the network.