A Hybrid Approach to Actor-Actor Connectivity Restoration in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) consist of powerful actors and resource constraint sensors, which are linked together in wireless networks. In some applications, actors must communicate with each other to make appropriate decisions and perform coordinated actions. Actor-actor network connectivity is vital to networks in such applications. Since WSAN applications are mostly deployed in harsh environments, actor nodes may fail and partition their network. This paper proposes a comparatively more efficient distributed approach to restore actor-actor connectivity upon the failure of any actor by identifying critical actors as well as the connectivity dominating set of the network. This hybrid method helps in detecting critical nodes and candidate replacement actors more precisely while minimizing the total number of required messages for network restoration. Handling the failure of the actors is done in a proactive manner. The proposed approach minimizes both the total actors' movements and restoration time of network. When a failed actor is a critical node, actors in its neighborhood are relocated in a coordinated way to reconnect the actor network. The superiority of the proposed approach is validated through simulative experiments.