Restoring connectivity in Wireless Sensor-Actor Networks with minimal node movement
Ameer A. Abbasi, Mohamed Younis, Uthman A. Baroudi · 2011
In Wireless Sensor-Actor Networks (WSANs), sensors probe their surroundings and send their data to more capable actor nodes in order to execute an application task. The actors' response is mostly collaborative and requires them to coordinate their operation. Therefore, a strongly connected inter-actor topology would be necessary at all time and tolerance of an actor failure becomes a design requirement. Autonomous repositioning of actor nodes has been deemed as an effective recovery strategy. This paper presents a Least-Movement Topology Repair (LeMoToR) algorithm. LeMoToR is a distributed scheme that relies on the local view of a node about the network. To restore connectivity, LeMoToR strives to relocate the least number of nodes and reduce the traveled distance and message complexity. Unlike contemporary schemes that maintain 1 or 2-hop neighbor lists, LeMoToR utilizes existing path discovery activities in the network in order to know the structure of the topology and avoids imposing additional pre-failure communication overhead. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of LeMoToR.