A Distributed Fault-Tolerant Topology Control Algorithm for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper introduces a distributed fault-tolerant topology control algorithm, called the Disjoint Path Vector (DPV), for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks composed of a large number of sensor nodes with limited energy and computing capability and several supernodes with unlimited energy resources. The DPV algorithm addresses the k-degree Anycast Topology Control problem where the main objective is to assign each sensor´s transmission range such that each has at least k-vertex-disjoint paths to supernodes and the total power consumption is minimum. The resulting topologies are tolerant to k-1 node failures in the worst case. We prove the correctness of our approach by showing that topologies generated by DPV are guaranteed to satisfy k-vertex supernode connectivity. Our simulations show that the DPV algorithm achieves up to 4-fold reduction in total transmission power required in the network and 2-fold reduction in maximum transmission power required in a node compared to existing solutions.