Design and Analysis of a MST-Based Topology Control Scheme with PSO for Wireless Sensor Networks

Topology control is one of the most fundamental problems in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is of great importance for prolonging network lifetime, reducing radio interference and energy consumption, increasing the efficiency of media access control (MAC) protocols and routing protocols, among other things. In this paper, the problem is transformed into a model of multi-criteria degree constrained minimum spanning tree (mcd-MST), and a non-dominated discrete particle swarm optimization (NDPSO) is designed to deal with this problem. To obtain a better approximation of true Pareto front, the phenotype sharing function of the objective space is applied in the definition of fitness function in NDPSO. Furthermore, a topology control scheme based on NDPSO is proposed in this paper. Simulation results show that the topology derived under the proposed scheme has low total power consumption, high robust structure and low contention among nodes, and it also can effectively prolong the lifetime of network.