ECTC: Energy efficient topology control algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Sensor network which operates on battery are used to gather data in a variety of environments. The data collected by each node is communicated through the network to the sink, which uses all reported data to determine characteristics of the environment or detect an event. Prolonging sensor's operable lifetime is a main design challenge of these networks. A good energy saving technique in this direction is to schedule nodes sleep interval with the communication radio turned off. In this paper, we propose a distributed topology control algorithm, termed ECTC, which uses a clustering approach. It is built on the notion that when a region of a shared channel wireless sensor network has a sufficient density of nodes, significant energy saving is obtained by allowing redundant nodes to sleep. Using the two-hop neighborhood information, certain nodes sequentially select a subset of nodes to be active among all nodes in the neighborhood, to ensure connectivity. Moreover, to ensure fairness, the role of active nodes is rotated periodically to ensure energy-balanced operations. Results from stochastic geometry are used to derive solutions for the values of parameters of our algorithm that minimize the total energy spent in the network when all sensor nodes report data through the cluster heads to the sink.