The invention discloses a topology control method of a wireless sensor network used for monitoring the water quality of an inland river. The topology control method comprises a network initialization stage, a clustering stage, a cluster head election stage, an in-cluster communication stage and an inter-cluster communication stage. Aimed at the wireless sensor network which is used for monitoring the water quality of the inland river and characterized by multiple aggregation nodes and long-distance bilinear distribution, the topology control method divides the wireless sensor network into virtual grids same in size, and all active sensor nodes in each virtual grid constitute a cluster. In each turn, nodes with low communication cost and high residual energy are selected to serve as clusters, other nodes transmit monitoring data to the clusters in a single-hop data transmission mode, data fusion is conducted on the clusters, the data are transmitted to the near aggregation nodes in an inter-cluster multi-hop data transmission mode, and if a path is blocked, the data are reversely transmitted to the far aggregation nodes. The topology control method effectively prolongs the life cycle of the network, balances the load of the network, and optimizes the performance of the network.