Hybrid connectivity restoration in wireless sensor and actor networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks are becoming more and more popular in the recent years. Each WSAN consists of numerous sensors and a few actors working collaboratively to carry out specific tasks. Unfortunately, actors are prone to failure due to harsh deployment environments and constrained power, which may break network connectivity resulting in disjoint components. Thus, maintaining the connectivity among actors is especially important. This paper proposes hybrid connectivity restoration (HCR), which integrates proactive selection and reactive motion. An actor protectively selects a backup node through its one-hop neighbor table and informs the backup node to supervise its stage. Once it fails, the backup node moves to the best position to restore the connectivity of the failed node’s neighbors reactively. This triggers a local recovery process at the backup node, which is repeated until network connectivity is restored. In order to minimize travel distance, HCR selects the backup node which moves the shortest distance to restore connectivity. Furthermore, HCR opts to reduce the number of messages by just informing the failure to its backup node. The correctness and effectiveness of HCR are validated through both theoretical analysis and simulations.