Localized and Configurable Topology Control in Lossy Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent empirical studies revealed that multi-hop wireless networks like wireless sensor networks and 802.11 mesh networks are inherently lossy. This finding introduces important new challenges for topology control. Existing topology control schemes often aim at maintaining network connectivity that cannot guarantee satisfactory path quality and communication performance when underlying links are lossy. In this paper, we present a localized algorithm, called Configurable Topology Control (CTC), that can configure a network topology to different provable quality levels (quantified by worst-case dilation bounds in terms of expected total number of transmisssions) required by applications. Each node running CTC computes its transmission power solely based on the link quality information collected within its local neighborhood and does not assume that the neighbor locations or communication ranges are known. Our simulations based on a realistic radio model of Mica2 motes show that CTC yields configurable communication performance and outperforms existing topology control algorithms that do not account for lossy links