Heuristics for Designing Energy-efficient Wireless Sensor Network Topologies

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have been studied in several contexts. There are many challenges involving WSN design such as the energy resources optimization, the robustness and the network coverage. We address here the problem of energy-efficient topology design. A welldesigned dynamic topology and efficient routing algorithms may allow a large reduction on the energy consumption, which is one of the main concerns of WSN nodes. In this work, we propose to model the problem of clustering a WSN topology as a variation of the independent dominating set optimization problem. Then, we describe two heuristics to generate a WSN topology and two ways to evaluate the energy consumption. Computational results are presented for instances with up to 500 nodes.