The question of fairness in wireless sensor networks is not studied very well. It is not unusual to observe in the literature fairness traded for low latency or reliability. However, a disproportional use of some critical nodes as relaying nodes can cause premature network fragmentation. This paper investigates fairness in multi-hop wireless sensor networks and proposes a topology control protocol that enables nodes to exhaust their energy fairly. Moreover, it demonstrates that whereas the number of neighboring nodes with which a node should cooperate depends on the density of the network, increasing this number beyond a certain amount does not contribute to network connectivity.