HETCP: A Hierachical Energy Efficient Topology Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In many applications of wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes are densely deployed in the area of interest. It is nontrivial to establish an efficient topology that provides communication under energy constrains and system dynamics. In this paper, a new hierarchical energy aware topology control protocol named HETCP is proposed. It combines energy balance metric and energy conserving metric together to optimize topologies. It forms sensor nodes into clusters to balance energy load and improve the network scalability. Inside clusters, a subset of nodes is selected to work while others remained sleeping in order to save energy. Both clustering and sleeping schedule algorithm are introduced in detail. Simulation results show that HETCP has excellent stability and energy efficiency