Load and Energy Aware Topology Control in Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

Most of the topology control protocols for wireless ad hoc networks focus on minimizing power consumptions while maintaining connectivity. Those protocols are static in nature due to the fact that all the nodes use only a fixed set of (energy efficient) relays. However, using the same set of relays all the time causes some nodes to become heavily loaded creating congestion, unbalanced traffic and high latency in the network. Instead of generating a single topology with fixed relay sets, we propose a distributed algorithm that generates a family of connected topology with (possibly) disjoint relay sets. Thus, by creating different energy aware relay sets of each node the proposed algorithm performs a time-delayed rotation of data forwarding duty among those sets in order to evenly distribute loads in the network. We illustrate the efficiency and efficacy of the proposed algorithm through simulation experiments.