EasiTPQ: QoS-Based Topology Control in Wireless Sensor Network

With the rapid development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the requirements for quality of service (QoS) are growing, particularly in applications where real time imaging, video or audio communications are involved. The system needs to meet both optimized energy consumption design metric and to satisfy certain QoS requirements simultaneously from long view. Different from most of the existing works which deal with resource allocation (e.g., scheduling or buffering) or routing strategy to achieve QoS, we extend QoS support to the topology control layer by introducing a number of active nodes distributed in a gradient fashion based on their logical distances to the sink node. In this paper, a novel topology control algorithm, namely EasiTPQ (Easy QoS-based topology control) is proposed to improve QoS performance in wireless sensor networks. Simulation results show that data loss rate and latency are averagely improved by 55 and 45%, respectively.