210 Int. J. Sensor Networks, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2012
Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
Dynamic topology construction of wireless sensor
network using computational geometric approach
Sarbani Roy* and Nandini Mukherjee
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Jadavpur University,
Kolkata 700 032, India
Email: sarbani.roy@ieee.org
Email: nmukherjee@cse.jdvu.ac.in
*Corresponding author
Abstract: Monitoring a large area with wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires a very large
number of sensor nodes which entails more energy consumption. One of the main design
challenges in the WSNs is energy efficiency to prolong the network operable lifetime. Generally,
most of the energy is spent for radio communication between sensor nodes. Another important
requirement of WSN is that it should be self-organising, i.e. sensing ranges and transmission
ranges are dynamically restructured with changing topology. Moreover, sensor nodes with
variable sensing and transmission ranges facilitate less energy consumption and enhance the
capacity of WSN significantly. An effective approach for energy conservation is turning off
extraneous nodes, while the remaining nodes stay active to provide continuous monitoring
service. An efficient planning of WSN using this approach can control the energy consumption of
the whole network. In this paper, by using computational geometry theoretic, we propose a
general algorithmic framework for dynamic topology construction of WSN for a given
environmental monitoring application.
Keywords: WSN; wireless sensor network; Voronoi diagram; Delaunay triangulation; coverage;
node scheduling.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Roy, S. and Mukherjee, N. (2012) ‘Dynamic
topology construction of wireless sensor network using computational geometric approach’,
Int. J. Sensor Networks, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp.210–222.
Biographical notes: Sarbani Roy joined as a faculty member in Department of Computer
Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University, India in 2006. She received the PhD degree in
Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India in July, 2008, and the MTech degree in
Computer Science & Engineering, the MSc degree in Computer and Information Science and the
BSc Honours degree in Computer Science from University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India in 2002,
2000 and 1998 respectively. Her research interests are in the area of grid and cloud computing,
distributed computing and wireless sensor networks. She is a member of the IEEE.
Nandini Mukherjee joined as a faculty member in Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, Jadavpur University, India in 1992. In 1996 she received Commonwealth
Scholarship tenable at UK. She completed her PhD in Computer Science from University of
Manchester, UK in 1999. She has become a Professor in Jadavpur University in 2006. Currently
she is the director of School of Mobile Computing and Communication, Jadavpur University. Her
research interests are in the area of high performance parallel computing, grid computing and
wireless sensor networks. She is a senior member of IEEE.
1 Introduction
In recent time, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have
attracted lot of research interests for their applicability in
national security, disaster management, surveillance, military,
healthcare, and environmental monitoring applications. WSN
consists of a number of low-cost sensors scattered in a
geographical area of interest and connected by a radio
interface. Sensors gather information from the environment
and send it to a gateway or sink nodes. Usually, sensor
nodes are equipped with limited energy and computational
resources which keep their cost low. The set of nodes that
are deployed in a sensor network can be either a homogeneous
or heterogeneous group of nodes. A homogeneous group is
a group in which all of the nodes have the same capabilities.
A heterogeneous group is one in which some nodes are
more powerful than the other nodes.
Deployment of sensor nodes is one of the major issues
in WSN environment. Generally, deployment of sensor
nodes in WSN can be categorised as either a dense
deployment or a sparse deployment (Mulligan et al., 2010).
In case of dense deployment, sensor nodes are placed near