Efficient on-demand topology control for wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

Topology control in wireless ad hoc networks has been heavily studied recently. Different geometric topologies were proposed to be used as the underlying network topologies, in order to achieve the sparseness of the communication network or to guarantee the package delivery of specific routing methods. However, most of the proposed topology control algorithms were applied for all nodes in the networks at the initial network startup stage, and the constructed topologies were kept being maintained thereafter. The overhead of topology control at each node at any time is notable, and this affects the performance of the network and wastes energy for each wireless node. This paper seeks to investigate the practices of efficient on-demand topology control protocol for wireless ad hoc networks. In our new protocol, we only apply the specific topology control technique where and when the wireless node needs it. Our simulation confirms that our scheme has better performance than several existing methods.