Chapter 7

Topology Control in Sensor, Actuator, and Mobile Robot Networks

Arnaud Casteigts, Amiya Nayak, and Ivan Stojmenovic

School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N6N5

Abstract

The efficiency of many sensor network algorithms depends on characteristics of the underlying connectivity, such as the length and density of links. It is therefore a common practice to control the number and nature of links that are to be used among all potentially available links. Such topology control can be achieved by modifying the transmission radii, selecting a given subset of the links, or moving some nodes (if such functionality is available). This chapter reviews some of these problems, and related solutions applicable to the context of sensor and actuator networks. Spanning structures and minimum weight connectivity are first discussed, and some applications for power-efficient and delay-bounded data aggregation are described. The issue of detecting critical nodes and links to build a biconnected topology is also investigated, with the aim of providing fault tolerance to the applications, and some recent and prospective works considering biconnectivity of mobile sensors/actuators and related deployment of sensors, augmentation, area and point coverage are discussed.

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