A Generalized Probabilistic Topology Control for Wireless Sensor Networks

Topology control is an effective method to improve the energy-efficiency and increase the communication capacity of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Traditional topology control algorithms are based on deterministic model that fails to consider lossy links which provide only probabilistic connectivity. Noticing this fact, we propose a novel probabilistic network model. We meter the network connectivity using network reachability. It is defined as the minimal of the upper limit of the end-to-end delivery ratio between any pair of nodes in the network. We attempt to find a minimal transmission power for each node while the network reachability is above a given application-specified threshold. The whole procedure is called probabilistic topology control (PTC). We prove that PTC is NP-hard and propose a fully distributed algorithm called BRASP. We prove that BRASP has the guaranteed performance and the communication overhead is O(|E| + |V|). The experimental results show that the network energy-efficiency can be improved by up to 250% and the average node degree is reduced by 50%.