Scale-free topology for large-scale wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose an efficient and fault tolerant topology control algorithm named AWSF for large-scale wireless sensor networks, which introduces the scale-free characteristic of complex networks into the topology of wireless sensor networks to minimize transmission delay and increase robustness. It is a distributed algorithm, letting each node locally adjust its transmission power and determine its neighbor relationship based on certain arbitrary weights which are random real numbers following a negative power-law probability distribution. The topology constructed under AWSF is proved to be scale-free, strongly connected and bi-directional. Simulation results show that the resulting topology has a small average degree and good network performance in terms of transmission delay and robustness.