An Energy Efficient Topology Control Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks Utilizing Randomized Beamforming
Li Xiao · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2011
Directional antennas have received considerable attention in the last few years due to the spatial-reuse they provide which increases the potential capacity of wireless networks.But the topological connectivity of beamforming antennas in multi-hop wireless networks is more complicated than topologies for wireless networks with omni-directional antennas.Topology control aims to maintain network connectivity and reduce energy consumption for Ad hoc networks using directional antennas.In this paper,the authors employ quadrat statistical methods to derive analytical expressions to determine the critical neighbor number for randomized beamforming network model.A distributed neighbor-based topology control protocol,referred to as the RBNTC,is proposed to maintain the outdegree of every node equal to or slightly below a specific value K.The protocol exchanges exactly bound messages;another positive feature is that it is based on distance estimation only,which can be implemented at a reasonable cost.Extensive simulations are carried out,which show that the RBNTC is to achieve a high probability(more than 99%) of connectivity while constructing a wireless network topology with minimum-energy property.Simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves considerably better performance than the topology control protocol K-Neigh based on omni-directional antennas in terms of power efficiency and traffic carrying capacity of the network.