Title: Application-centric recovery algorithm for wireless sensor and actor networks

Authors: Muhammad Imran; Abas Md Said; Mohamed Younis; Halabi Hasbullah

Addresses: Deanship of Electronic Transactions and Communication, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ' Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Bandar Seri Iskandar, 31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia ' Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA ' Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Bandar Seri Iskandar, 31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia

Abstract: Sustaining actor-actor connectivity is extremely crucial in mission-critical applications of wireless sensor and actor networks where actors have to quickly plan optimal coordinated responses to detected events. This paper presents ACR, a novel hybrid application-centric connectivity restoration algorithm that factors in the application besides efficient resource utilisation while recovering from critical node failures. As a pre-failure planning measure to minimise recovery delay, ACR identifies the actors' primaries that are critical for network connectivity based on localised information and then designates for them backup nodes. The backup nodes are carefully picked to satisfy application concerns such as actor effectiveness. In order to minimise the impact of critical node failure on coverage and connectivity, ACR appoints high degree nodes with overlapped coverage. Upon failure detection, the pre-designated backup pursues controlled and coordinated movement to replace the failed node. We prove the convergence of ACR and analytically derive bounds on its performance. Simulation results further confirm the performance of ACR.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSNs; actor networks; fault tolerance; application-centric recovery; controlled relocation; coordinated relocation; network connectivity; mission-critical applications; coordinated response; node failure; pre-failure planning; recovery delay; network coverage; backup nodes; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2013.054241

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2013 Vol.10 No.4, pp.379 - 401

Received: 09 Apr 2011
Accepted: 16 Jan 2012
Published online: 30 Jul 2013 *

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