A survey on topology control in wireless sensor networks: Taxonomy, comparative study, and open issues

The wireless sensor network (WSN) technology spawns a surge of unforeseen applications. The diversity of these emerging applications represents the great success of this technology. A fundamental performance benchmark of such applications is topology control, which characterizes how well a sensing field is monitored and how well each pair of sensors is mutually connected in WSNs. This paper provides an overview of topology control techniques. We classify existing topology control techniques into two categories: network coverage and network connectivity. For each category, a surge of existing protocols and techniques are presented with the focus on blanket coverage, barrier coverage, sweep coverage, power management, and power control, five rising aspects that attract significant research attention in recent years. In this survey, we emphasize the basic principles of topology control to understand the state of the arts, while we explore future research directions in the new open areas and propose a series of design guidelines under this topic. © 1963-2012 IEEE.