Sparse power-efficient topologies for wireless ad hoc sensor networks

We study the problem of power-efficient routing for multi-hop wireless ad hoc sensor networks. The guiding insight of our work is that unlike an ad hoc wireless network, a wireless ad hoc sensor network does not require full connectivity among the nodes. As long as the sensing region is well covered by connected nodes, the network can perform its task. We consider two kinds of geometric random graphs as base interconnection structures: unit disk graphs UDG(2, λ) and k-nearest-neighbor graphs NN(2, k) built on points generated by a Poisson point process of density λ in R2. We provide subgraph constructions for these two models–UDG-SENS(2, λ) and NN-SENS(2, k) respectively–and show that there are values of the parameters λ and k, λs and ks respectively, above which these constructions have the following good properties: (i) they are sparse; (ii) they are power-efficient in the sense that the graph distance is no more than a constant times the Euclidean distance between any pair of points; (iii) they cover the space well; (iv) the subgraphs can be set up easily in a distributed fashion using local information at each node. We also describe a simple local algorithm for routing packets on these subgraphs.