Workload-aware path repairing scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a vital role in applications like disaster management and human relief, habitat monitoring, studying the weather and eco system etc. As the location of deployment of WSNs is usually remote, the source of energy is restricted to battery. Hence, all routing and data processing techniques used need to be energy-efficient. When in a WSN, tree topology is adopted for query/result transmission, node failures may lead to disconnectivity of corresponding subtrees from the network. This causes serious threat to the effectiveness and lifetime of the network. One important reason for a node failure is power outage at the node. The research work done till date in this connection addresses the issue of recovering from a node failure, without much care for workload balancing while identifying the alternative paths for the disconnected subtrees. In this paper, we propose a scheme for recovering from node failures due to power outages in a WSN, by selecting a new parent for the dependents of a failed node. As our proposed path repairing scheme is workload-aware, it results in optimal utilization of the energy, and increases the effectiveness and lifetime of wireless sensor networks. This also leads to effective utilization of the critical data available at individual nodes.