RTCP: Redundancy aware Topology Control Protocol for wireless sensor network

One of the main design challenges, in wireless sensor networks, is to save energy of sensors and obtain a long system lifetime without sacrificing the quality of network coverage and connectivity. Topology control based sleep scheduling is the primary technique of energy saving which consists to exploit node redundancy and save energy by putting as many nodes as possible in sleep mode, while maintaining a connected network. In this paper, we propose a Redundancy aware Topology Control Protocol (RTCP) for wireless sensor network which exploits the sensor redundancy in the same region by dividing the network into groups so that a connected backbone can be maintained by keeping a necessary set of working nodes and turning off the redundant ones. RTCP identifies equivalent nodes in terms of communication based only on the connectivity information of one-hop neighbors which leads to a low communication overhead and then schedule nodes based on this equivalence. RTCP allows only the election of one sensor node to be active in each group. The simulation results illustrate that RTCP outperforms some other existing algorithms in terms of energy conservation and network lifetime.