A topology control protocol based on eligibility and efficiency metrics

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 nodes with which a node should cooperate depends on the density of the network, increasing this number beyond a certain amount does not contribute to network connectivity.