Topology Control and Maintenance in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are prepared with radio transceivers that assist to form and maintain a fully connected network of sensor nodes. WSNs do not have a permanent infrastructure and do not use centralized methods for organization. Due to their exclusive structure and very less energy storage, computational and memory resources, many of the existing protocols and algorithms designed for such networks cannot be directly used in WSNs. It is anticipated that topology control methods will play an important role in managing the complexity of such highly complicated and distributed systems through self-organization capabilities. The applications related to WSNs are normally optimized by the given network topology and need to be optimized by means of topology control. Topology Construction (TC) and Topology Maintenance (TM) are the aspects that govern the entire topology of WSNs besides regulating the characteristics like queue size, energy consumption, data scheduling and transfer of message packets. It is vital for a network to operate with low energy and better coverage (queue size) with an efficient data transfer rate. In this paper a comparative study of A3, A3-Coverage (A3-Cov), Just tree and Simple tree algorithms have been discussed and the simulation results in terms of queue size, energy consumption and data transfer are put forward.