Topology Control for Guaranteed Connectivity Provisioning in Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Topology control is important for heterogeneous sensor networks in order to minimize the total network power consumption under the constraint that all sensor nodes' connectivity requirements are satisfied. To address this issue, an optimization problem is first formulated, which is formally proved to be NP-hard. For practical applications, an effective solution, named topology adaptation algorithm (TAA), is proposed. TAA adopts both graph theory and maximum flow theory to find prespecified node disjoint paths with low time complexity and high network power efficiency. In order to further save the network power consumption, a judgment theory is proposed to remove any unnecessary long edges at the beginning without affecting network connectivity. Both theoretical and numeric results show that the proposed topology control algorithm can outperform counterparts in terms of the total network power consumption, the percentage of supernodes achieving k-connectivity, the average degree of nodes, and the average length of paths.