A connectivity-keeping hierarchical topology for mobile wireless sensor networks

Topology for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has always been a research focus. There are some classical topologies have been proposed such as cluster-based topology and chain-based topology. However, for mobile WSNs, the distribution of the nodes changes frequently so that most of the existing topologies could not maintain the connectivity of the network. In this paper, we proposed a Connectivity-Keeping Hierarchical Topology for mobile WSNs which is a backbone-based topology. In the proposed topology, a backbone network is generated which is the basis of maintaining the connectivity of the network. The energy consumption can also be reduced by the specific generation algorithm of the backbone network. Simulations were carried out to prove that the proposed topology has a better performance of energy consumption compared with cluster-base topology and chain-based topology.