Designing logical topology for wireless sensor networks: A multi-chain oriented approach

An optimal logical topology of a wireless sensor network (WSN) facilitates the deployed sensor nodes to communicate with each other with little overheads, lowers energy consumption, lengthens lifetime of the network, provides scalability, increases reliability, and reduces latency. Designing an optimal logical topology for a WSN thus needs to consider numerous factors. Chain oriented topologies have been found to offer a number of improvements in energy consumptions, lifetime, and load balancing than other topologies of WSNs. However, they usually suffer from latency, scalability, reliability and interference problems. In this paper, we present a chain oriented logical topology, which offers solutions to those problems. The proposed topology is designed such that it retains the advantages of the chain oriented topologies, and at the same time, overcomes the problems of the chain oriented topology such as latency, scalability, and data reliability. The proposed topology provides a communication abstraction, which can be easily used to devise a range of application protocols. Moreover, the logical topology offers node management, resource management, and other services. The performance of the proposed topology is compared with other topologies in respect to total energy consumption and lifetime of the network.