Self-stabilising hybrid connectivity control protocol for WSNs

In this study, the authors address the problem of combining hierarchical and flat techniques to construct and maintain nodes’ connectivity as well as links’ symmetry (bidirectionality) in a wireless sensor network (WSN) comprising static nodes. They propose a localised and asynchronous self-stabilising hybrid message passing a solution that seamlessly merges three well known connectivity control techniques for such ad hoc networks, namely k-hop clustering $\lpar k \ge 1\rpar $(k≥1), power control (transmission range adjustment) and sleep/wake scheduling. Their stigmergy-based strategy (i.e. inspired from ants’ pheromone-based communication, division of labour and swarming behaviours) allows a WSN to simultaneously cope with issues such as scalability, fault tolerance, transmission range minimisation, energy hole problem (i.e. premature node deaths in the vicinity of the sink), channel overhearing and signalisation reduction. To the best of their knowledge, such a solution does not exist in the literature. The few self-stabilising hybrid connectivity control protocols currently proposed use only two of the above-mentioned techniques. The authors formally prove the correctness of their scheme and its self-stabilisation property under an unfair distributed daemon. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has a low average convergence time, is energy efficient and can prolong network lifetime.