Comparative Study of Various Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) Topology Construction Protocols

As the cost for wireless sensors and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have decreased, they have become more ubiquitous; they are increasingly being used in many applications such as security, structural monitoring and environmental monitoring. Many WSN applications employ a random sensor deployment to provide sensor coverage. The choice of the Topology Construction (TC) and Topology Maintenance (TM) protocols will affect WSN lifetime. In this paper, two new load balancing TC protocols, SWST (Simple Weighted Spanning Tree), EAST (Energy Aware Spanning Tree) as well as three well known TC protocols, Simple Tree, Random Nearest Neighbor Tree (Random NNT) and Euclidean Minimum Spanning Tree (Euclidian MST), are studied using MATLAB and TC protocols such as A3 (A tree), A3 Coverage, Connected Dominating Set under Rule K (CDS Rule K), Energy Efficient Connected Dominating Set (EECDS), Simple Tree and K Neighbor (KNeigh) Tree, are simulated using Atarraya. Comparisons are performed between many of the TC protocols.