Battery recovery effect is a phenomenon that the available capacity of a battery could increase if the battery can sleep for a certain period of time since its last discharging. Accordingly, the battery can work for a longer time when it takes some rests between consecutive discharging processes than when it works all the time. However, this effect has not been considered in the design of energy-efficient topology control algorithms for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a distributed battery recovery effect aware connected dominating set constructing algorithm (BRE-CDS) for wireless sensor networks. In BRE-CDS, each network node periodically decides to join the connected dominating set or not. Nodes that have slept in the preceding round have priority to join the connected dominating set in the current round while nodes that have worked in the preceding round are encouraged to take sleep in the current round for battery recovery. Detailed algorithm design is presented. The computational complexity of BRE-CDS is deduced to be O(D-2), where D is node degree. Simulation results show that BRE-CDS can significantly prolong the network lifetime as compared with existing work. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.