A Self-Stabilizing Protocol for Energy-Efficient Topology Control and Connectivity Management in WSNs

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as a fundamental technology for various applications including environmental monitoring, industrial automation, military surveillance, and smart agriculture. However, the inherent energy constraints of sensor nodes pose significant challenges for network longevity and reliable connectivity. Self-stabilization, as a lightweight fault-tolerant approach, offers automatic recovery from transient faults without external intervention, making it particularly attractive for resource-constrained distributed systems. This paper presents CONSTRUCT, a novel self-stabilizing topology control protocol designed to simultaneously address connectivity management and energy conservation in WSNs. The proposed protocol integrates k-hop clustering, transmission power control, and adaptive sleep/wake scheduling within a unified self-stabilizing framework. CONSTRUCT enables each node to dynamically adjust its transmission range while maintaining network connectivity, thereby reducing energy consumption caused by idle listening, overhearing, and collisions. The protocol comprises six main processes: neighbor discovery, direct affiliation, cluster head selection and cluster formation, transmission range minimization, inter-cluster redundancy control, and topology maintenance. Through extensive simulations with various network sizes (۱۰۰-۱۰۰۰ nodes) and fault injection scenarios using Weibull and uniform distributions, we evaluate CONSTRUCT's convergence time and energy efficiency. Results demonstrate that CONSTRUCT achieves significantly lower average convergence time compared to existing protocols including FTS and SDEAC. Furthermore, the protocol exhibits superior energy efficiency, particularly in large-scale networks, by effectively postponing the First Sensor Node Death (FSND) and balancing energy consumption across backbone sensors. The self-stabilizing nature of CONSTRUCT ensures automatic recovery from transient faults and topology changes, making it a robust solution for dynamic WSN environments. This research contributes to the field of fault-tolerant topology control by providing a lightweight, scalable, and energy-efficient protocol suitable for resource-constrained sensor networks.

کلیدواژه ها:

Self-stabilization ، distributed computing ، wireless sensor networks ، connectivity control ، energy saving ، topology control ، fault tolerance ، clustering