Energy-efficient opportunistic topology control in wireless sensor networks

Topology control has been proposed as a promising technique to achieve energy-efficiency in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, existing topology control algorithms assume that wireless links are static, either connected or disconnected. Taking advantage of the time-varying characteristic of wireless links, we define the energy-efficient opportunistic topology control problem, which exploits opportunistic communication to maximize energy-efficiency as well as to satisfy given network performance requirement. After proving this problem to be NP-hard, we propose a greedy solution and show its effectiveness through simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to apply opportunistic communication to topology control in WSNs. We demonstrate that opportunistic topology control can significantly improve energy-efficiency without sacrificing network performance.