An Analysis of Topological Control Protocols & its Issues in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor network (WSN) are increasingly considered by the scientific community as the future of environmental monitoring. The characteristics of Topology control in WSN/Wireless ad-hoc network concerns like coverage, spot – sensing, energy consumption, active/sleep node, data transmission and life time of a node (e.g., small battery, limited computation capabilities, inexpensive transceiver etc.). The topology of a multi-hop wireless ad hoc network can be viewed as a graph with an edge connecting any pair of Nodes. One of the key approaches for prolonging the sensor network operable lifetime is to deploy an effective topology control protocol. The aim of this survey paper is to analyze the topology control protocols which are being used to construct or to maintain a Centralized/Distributed wireless sensor network. In this paper, we are going to discuss about the objectives, characteristics and classification of routing protocols and the classification of topology control protocols (Centralized controlling and Distributed monitoring method) and also the challenges in topology control.