Energy-efficient topology control for three-dimensional sensor networks

Topology control in sensor networks has been heavily studied recently. Different geometric topologies were proposed to be the underlying network topologies to achieve the sparseness of the communication networks or to guarantee the package delivery of specific routing methods. However, most of the proposed topology control algorithms were only applied to Two-Dimensional (2D) networks where all sensor nodes are distributed in a 2D plane. In practice, the sensor networks are often deployed in 3D space, such as sensor nodes in a forest. This paper seeks to investigate efficient topology control protocols for 3D sensor networks. In our new protocols, we extend several 2D geometric topologies to 3D case, and propose some new 3D Yao-based topologies for sensor networks. We also prove several properties (e.g. bounded degree and constant power stretch factor) for them in 3D space. The simulation results confirm our theoretical proofs for these proposed 3D topologies.