Topology control for delay-constraint data collection in wireless sensor networks

Data collection is one of the most important operations in wireless sensor networks. Many practical applications require the real-time data transmission, such as monitoring, tracking, etc. In this paper, we import and define the topology control problem for delay-constraint data collection (TDDC), and then formalize this problem into an integer programming problem. As NP-Hardness of this problem, we present a load-aware power-increased topology control algorithm (namely LPTC) to heuristically solve the problem. The theoretical analysis shows that this algorithm can reach O(1)-approximation ratio for the linear networks. And we also analyze the impact of the delay-constraint on the worst-case for the planar networks. Moreover, this paper designs two localized algorithms, called as SDEL and DDEL, based on the area division for TDDC problem. The experimental results show that LPTC algorithm can save at least 17% power consumptions compared with HBH algorithm in many situations.