Copyright © 2012 Xiaojuan Luo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Based on the complex network theory, a new topological evolving model is proposed. In the evolution of the topology of sensor networks, the energy-aware mechanism is taken into account, and the phenomenon of change of the link and node in the network is discussed. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation are conducted to explore the topology characteristics and network performance with different node energy distribution. We find that node energy distribution has the weak effect on the degree distribution P(k) that evolves into the scale-free state, nodes with more energy carry more connections, and degree correlation is nontrivial disassortative. Moreover, the results show that, when nodes energy is more heterogeneous, the network is better clustered and enjoys higher performance in terms of the network efficiency and the average path length for transmitting data.