Localized topology control for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

This article studies topology control in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, where different wireless sensors may have different maximum transmission ranges and two nodes can communicate directly with each other if and only if they are within the maximum transmission range of each other. We present several localized topology control strategies in which every wireless sensor maintains logical communication links to only a selected small subset of its physical neighbors using information of sensors within its local neighborhood in a heterogeneous network environment. We prove that the global logical network topologies formed by these locally selected links are sparse and/or power efficient and our methods are communication efficient. Here a structure is power efficient if the total power consumption of the least cost path connecting any two nodes in it is no more than a small constant factor of that in the original heterogeneous communication network. By utilizing the wireless broadcast channel capability, and assuming that a message sent by a sensor node will be received by all sensors within its transmission region with at most a constant number of transmissions, we prove that all our methods use at most O(n) total messages, where each message has O(log n) bits. We also conduct extensive simulations to study the practical performance of our methods.