Cellular automata for topology control in Wireless Sensor Networks

We use cellular automata for simulating topology control algorithms in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). A cellular automaton is a decentralized computing model providing an excellent platform for performing complex computations using only local information. WSNs are composed of a large number of distributed sensor nodes operating on batteries; the objective of the topology control problem in WSNs is to select an appropriate subset of nodes able to monitor a region at a minimum energy consumption cost thus extending the network lifetime. We have used cellular automata to model a randomized WSN topology control algorithm and have experimentally evaluated its performance.