GTC: a geographical topology control protocol to conserve energy in wireless sensor networks. (1st January 2013) - Zebbane, B.
One of the main design challenges, in wireless sensor networks, is to save energy of sensors and obtain long system lifetime without sacrificing the quality of network coverage and connectivity. Topology control is the primary technique of energy saving. It consists in keeping a minimum number of sensor nodes to operate in active mode with the purpose of conserving energy. It also ensures network connectivity and/or coverage. In this paper, we propose a geographical topology control (GTC) protocol to reduce energy consumption in wireless sensor networks by sleep scheduling among sensor nodes with the purpose to ensure the network connectivity. GTC identifies redundant nodes and organises them into zones so that a connected backbone can be maintained by keeping only one active node in each zone. The redundant ones are turned off. The scheduling strategy, used by GTC, minimises the number of transitions between sleep and active states in order to minimise the transition energy and the leader election frequency. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol exhibits better performance, in terms of network lifetime, data delivery, scalability, and message overhead.