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 tocommunicate with each other with little overheads,lowers energy consumption, lengthens lifetime of thenetwork, provides scalability, increases reliability, and reduces latency. Designing an optimal logicaltopology for a WSN thus needs to consider numerousfactors. Chain oriented topologies have been foundto offer a number of improvements in energy consumptions, lifetime, and load balancing than othertopologies of WSNs. However, they usually suffer from latency, scalability, reliability and interferenceproblems. In this paper, we present a chain oriented logical topology, which offers solutions to thoseproblems. The proposed topology is designed such that it retains the advantages of the chain orientedtopologies, 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 canbe easily used to devise a range of application protocols. Moreover, the logical topology offers nodemanagement, resource management, and other services. The performance of the proposed topology iscompared with other topologies in respect to totalenergy consumption and lifetime of the network.