TLDTCA: A distributed approach to meeting heterogenous connectivity requirements to sink in M2M networks

Due to potential heterogeneity in criticality of sensing data, machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are required to provide multi-level connectivity to the sink for device nodes. In this paper, topology control is discussed for M2M networks consisting of two different types of device nodes, called supernodes and ordinary nodes. Supernodes are required to have k node-disjoint paths to the sink while ordinary nodes to have at least one path. Inspired by the underlying good characteristics of a special hierarchical topology, a tree-like distributed topology control algorithm (TLDTCA) is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in literature to address distributed topology control for M2M networks. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of success rate and total network power consumption.