An energy-efficient topology construction algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Topology management schemes have emerged as promising approaches for prolonging the lifetime of the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The connected dominating set (CDS) concept has also emerged as the most popular method for energy-efficient topology control in WSNs. A sparse CDS-based network topology is highly susceptible to partitioning, while a dense CDS leads to excessive energy consumption due to overlapped sensing areas. Therefore, finding an optimal-size CDS with which a good trade-off between the network lifetime and network coverage can be made is a crucial problem in CDS-based topology control. In this paper, a degree-constrained minimum-weight version of the CDS problem, seeking for the load-balanced network topology with the maximum energy, is presented to model the energy-efficient topology control problem in WSNs. A learning automata-based heuristic is proposed for finding a near optimal solution to the proxy equivalent degree-constrained minimum-weight CDS problem in WSN. A strong theorem in presented to show the convergence of the proposed algorithm. Superiority of the proposed topology control algorithm over the prominent existing methods is shown through the simulation experiments in terms of the number of active nodes (network topology size), control message overhead, residual energy level, and network lifetime.