For a wide spectrum of applications ranging from habitat monitoring to battlefield surveillance, the wireless sensor network (WSN) technology has exhibited revolutionary advantages when compared to traditional solutions. Among all the energy-saving schemes, topology control has been well recognized as an effective one. By providing an appropriate support for routing protocols, topology control enables more energy-efficient transmissions and higher network capacity....[ Read more ]

For a wide spectrum of applications ranging from habitat monitoring to battlefield surveillance, the wireless sensor network (WSN) technology has exhibited revolutionary advantages when compared to traditional solutions. Among all the energy-saving schemes, topology control has been well recognized as an effective one. By providing an appropriate support for routing protocols, topology control enables more energy-efficient transmissions and higher network capacity.

In traditional topology control, a wireless network is represented using deterministic model that assumes a pair of nodes is either connected or disconnected. In practice, however, most wireless links are intermittently connected, called lossy links. By successfully leveraging these lossy links, topologies of more energy-efficiency and higher network capacities are available. By traditional deterministic network model, however, WSN topologies can hardly be well characterized. To seize the opportunity of lossy links, I propose a new probabilistic network model. Using this model we are able to quantify the quality of the network connectivity. The key problem in probabilistic topology control is to seek a topology of minimized energy cost, while the quality of network connectivity satisfied certain constraints.

In this work, I prove that in general probabilistic topology control is a NP-hard problem. To serve different communication paradigms,I propose two algorithms called CONREAP and BRASP. The former CONREAP is for sink-to-sensor communications and BRASP is for general sensor-to-sensor communications. I prove that both CONREAP and BRASP has guaranteed network reachability for the derived topology. The worst running time is (∣E∣) and the space requirement is O(d). Experimental results show that CONREAP can remarkably reduce the energy cost. It is more appropriate for low requirement and large transitional region environments. In comparison, BRASP construct a topology of more energy cost, while the derived topology can serve for more general communication patterns from sensor to sensors.

To show how to efficiently transmit in a probabilistic wireless network with lossy links involved in, I proposed a novel reliability-oriented transmission protocol called proliferation routing. It leverages randomized dispersion and reproductions. The distinctive feature of proliferation routing is its great flexibility and high energy-efficiency. Not only can it be applied with any Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol and routing metrics, but also a desired service quality can be effectively derived by controlling the system parameters. I conduct comprehensive theoretical analysis and confirm it implementation and simulation experiments. In a specific experiment setup, proliferation routing can increase the end-to-end transmission success rate up to 70% compared with the well-known hop-based routing and flooding.