Towards augmenting federated wireless sensor networks in forestry applications

Environmental Monitoring (EM) has witnessed significant improvements in recent years due to the great utility of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Nevertheless, due to harsh operational conditions in such applications, WSNs often suffer large-scale damage in which nodes fail concurrently and the network gets partitioned into disjoint sectors. Thus, reestablishing connectivity between the sectors, via their remaining functional nodes, is of utmost importance in EM, especially in forestry. In this regard, considerable work has been proposed in the literature tackling this problem by deploying Relay Nodes (RNs) aimed at reestablishing connectivity. Although finding the minimum relay count and positions is NP-Hard, efficient heuristic approaches have been anticipated. However, the majority of these approaches ignore the surrounding environment characteristics and the infinite 3-dimensional (3-D) search space that significantly degrades network performance in practice. Therefore, we propose a 3-D grid-based deployment for RNs in which the relays are efficiently placed on grid vertices. We present a novel approach, named fixing augmented network damage intelligently, based on a minimum spanning tree construction to re-connect the disjointed WSN sectors. The performance of the proposed approach is validated and assessed through extensive simulations, and comparisons with two main stream approaches are presented. Our protocol outperforms the related work in terms of the average relay node count and distribution, the scalability of the federated WSNs in large-scale applications, and the robustness of the topologies formed.