Efficient Approach for Determining Network Partitioning and Recovery in Wireless Sensor Networks

The field of wireless sensor networks has undergone a rapid evolution in the last years. Recently, mobility has been introduced to sensor networks through the deployment of movable nodes. In movable wireless networks, network connectivity among the nodes is a crucial factor in order to relay data to the sink node, exchange data for collaboration, and perform data aggregation. However, such connectivity can be lost due to a failure of one or more nodes. Even a single node failure may partition the network, and thus, eventually reduce the quality and efficiency of the network operation. To handle this connectivity problem, an algorithm called PADRA is introduced to detect possible partitions, and then, restore the network connectivity through controlled relocation of movable nodes. The idea is to identify whether or not the failure of a node will cause partitioning in advance in a distributed manner. If a partitioning is to occur, PADRA designates a failure handler to initiate the connectivity restoration process. The goal of this PADRA is limited to single node failure. So we further extend PADRA to handle multiple node failures. The approach, namely, EPADRA strives to provide a mutual exclusion mechanism in repositioning the nodes to restore connectivity. The overall goal in this process is to localize the scope of the recovery and minimize the overhead imposed on the nodes. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is validated through simulation experiments.