A fault-tolerant topology control algorithm for heterogeneous wireless networks

Topology control of wireless ad hoc networks is a key design challenge which will affect the lifetime and performance of such networks. The topology can be controlled by selecting which neighbors to communicate directly and varying the transmission power at each node. Some fault tolerant topologies have already been proposed recently. However, most of these topologies require all nodes to have the same transmission range. Actually, there are cases that nodes have different transmission ranges. In this paper, we analyze the sufficient condition to construct k-connected topology in heterogeneous networks. Then, a topology control algorithm is proposed. Our proposed algorithm can be executed fully distributed by each node and only uses location information of 1-hop neighbors. An advantage of this algorithm is that it can be used in both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional wireless ad hoc networks. © 2012 IEEE.