Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) wireless sensor networks have attracted a lot of attention due to their great potential usages in both commercial and civilian applications, such as environmental data collection, pollution monitoring, space exploration, disaster prevention, and tactical surveillance. Topology control in 3D sensor networks has been studied recently, and different 3D geometric topologies were proposed to be the underlying network topologies to achieve the sparseness of the communication networks. However, most of these proposed 3D topologies cannot bound the maximum node degree, i.e., some nodes may need to maintain a large number of neighbors in the constructed topologies, which is not energy efficient and may lead to large contention. In this article, we extend several existing 3D geometric topologies to a set of new 3D topologies with bounded node degree. We provide both theoretical analysis and simulation evaluation on their power efficiency and node degree distributions. Our simulation results over random 3D sensor networks confirm nice performances of these proposed 3D topologies.