  The issue of optimizing the limited and often non-renewable energy of sensor
nodes due to its direct impact on network lifetime dominates every aspect of
wireless sensor networks. Existing techniques for optimizing energy consumption
are based on exploiting node redundancy, adaptive radio transmission power and
topology control. Topology control protocols have a significant impact on
network lifetime, available energy and connectivity. In this paper we classify
sensor nodes as strong and weak nodes based on their residual energy as well as
operational lifetime and propose a Clustering based topology control protocol
(CTCP) which extends network lifetime while guarantying the minimum
connectivity. Extensive simulations in Java-Simulator (J-Sim) show that our
proposed protocol outperforms the existing protocols in terms of various
performance metrics life network lifetime, average delay and minimizes energy
utilization.
