After an analysis and comparison of three most commonly used link-measuring standards in wireless sensor networks at present, it is concluded that there exists the lowest threshold of received signal strength (RSS) to satisfy a certain packet reception rate (PRR). Before taking RSS as the condition to construct topology, all nodes need to use the uniform transmitting power. Thus, the path-loss is determined as the condition of topology construction, and a path-loss based distributed topology control algorithm (PLBD) is designed. This algorithm does not only guarantee PRR, but also maintain the least loss links for correspondence between nodes. The simulation results have indicates that the topology constructed by PLBD algorithm keeps the network connective, and it has more advantages like low correspondence time-delay, good robustness and relatively balanced energy consumption.