A topology control protocol based on eligibility and efficiency metrics

eceived 4 September 2009 eceived in revised form 10 April 2010 ccepted 13 August 2010 vailable online xxx The question of fairness in wireless sensor networks is not studied very well. It is not unusual to observe in the literature fairness traded for low latency or reliability. However, a disproportional use of some critical nodes as relaying nodes can cause premature network fragmentation. This paper investigates fairness in multi-hop wireless sensor networks and proposes a topology control protocol that enables nodes to exhaust their energy fairly. Moreover, it demonstrates that whereas the number of neighboring nodeswithwhich anode should cooperate depends on thedensity of thenetwork, increasing this number does beyond a certain amount