Wireless Sensor Network(WSN)is a novel network that is proposed to collect, transmit and communicate data to the Base Station(BS). It is composed of numberless tiny sensor nodes that have the ability of communicating and computing. The topology of a network, which is determined by nodes' positions and transmission ranges, has a significant effect on network performance. By adjusting transmission powers of nodes, topology control is capable of optimizing network performance, reducing energy consumption and increasing network lifetime.In this paper, the structure and the characteristic of sensor network are introduced firstly. Several typical topology control algorithms are analyzed deeply. Meanwhile, some relative problems are specifically analyzed and researched on heterogeneous wireless sensor networks topology control Then, a Shortest-Path-Based Distributed Topology Control (SPDTC) algorithm for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks is presented. The algorithm maintains network connectivity only based on locally collected information and adjusts the topology structure according to the shortest-path algorithm by calculating the link weight. Then we modify SPDTC algorithm and the simulation results show that the modified algorithm can decrease energy consumption, improve energy efficiency and further prolong network lifetime. Then, a distributed topology maintenance scheme based on shortest-path tree is adopted when some nodes failed. It can maintain the network connectivity and performance while reducing the maintenance overhead.
