T-Hex: true hexagonal regular topology formation in large scale wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSNs) have seen a steady rise in their popularity and have become an integral part of a large spectrum of applications. Many of these applications advocate the use of large scale WSNs with dense deployments to provide comprehensive sensing coverage. The formation of clusters or overlay networks has been observed to improve the performance of such large scale networks. Furthermore, regular topologies offer many advantages when dealing with networks of this size. Current schemes focus on creating logical or semi-logical regular overlay networks only. In this paper, we present T-Hex, a distributed true hexagonal overlay network formation scheme for large scale networks, where all the nodes chosen to be a part of the overlay network strictly follow the hexagonal topology. We evaluate T-hex by simulating it on a densely deployed WSN, and demonstrate its overlay formation and self-healing capabilities.