In wireless sensor networks, topology control plays an important role for data forwarding efficiency in the data gathering applications. In this paper, we present a novel topology control and data forwarding mechanism called REMUDA, which is designed for a practical indoor parking lot management system. REMUDA forms a tree-based hierarchical network topology which brings as many nodes as possible to be leaf nodes and constructs a virtual cluster structure. Meanwhile, it takes the reliability, stability and path length into account in the tree construction process. Through an experiment in a network of 30 real sensor nodes, we evaluate the performance of REMUDA and compare it with LEPS which is also a practical routing protocol in TinyOS. Experiment results show that REMUDA can achieve better performance than LEPS. In this paper, we present a novel topology control and data forwarding mechanism called REMUDA, which is designed for a practical indoor parking lot management system. REMUDA forms a tree-based hierarchical network topology which brings as many nodes as possible to be leaf nodes and constructs a virtual cluster structure. Meanwhile, it takes the reliability, stability and path length into account in the tree construction process. Through an experiment in a network of 30 real sensor nodes, we evaluate the performance of REMUDA and compare it with LEPS which is also a practical routing protocol in TinyOS. Experiment results show that REMUDA can achieve better performance than LEPS.