Study of the association between local and global behaviors is essential for self-organizing communication system design and system control. A cellular automaton-based model is proposed for addressing the topology control problem of wireless sensor networks which well captures the essential features of system behaviors. It is shown that the system behaviors vary with different local rules, and may have oscillating, decreasing or stable patterns. Moreover, this model can also reflect the tradeoff between different system requirements, which maybe inspiring for further study.