Title: A least-movement topology repair algorithm for partitioned wireless sensor-actor networks

Authors: Ameer Ahmed Abbasi; Mohamed F. Younis; Uthman A. Baroudi

Addresses: Department of Computer Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran-31261, Saudi Arabia. ' Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. ' Department of Computer Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran-31261, Saudi Arabia

Abstract: In Wireless Sensor-Actor Networks (WSANs), sensors probe their surroundings and send their data to more capable actor nodes. The actors' response requires them to coordinate their operation. Therefore, a strongly connected inter-actor topology is necessary and tolerance of an actor failure becomes a design requirement. Autonomous repositioning of actors has been deemed as an effective recovery strategy. In this paper, we present a distributed network recovery scheme called Least-Movement Topology Repair (LeMoToR). To restore connectivity, LeMoToR relies on the local view of a node about the network and strives to relocate the least number of nodes. It also reduces the total travelled distance and overall inter-node communication complexity. LeMoToR does not impose pre-failure communication overhead and utilises existing path discovery activities in the network to know the structure of the topology. The performance of LeMoToR is validated analytically and through simulation. The validation results demonstrate the effectiveness of LeMoToR.

Keywords: wireless sensor-actor networks; fault tolerance; topology management; network connectivity restoration; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; distributed network recovery; path discovery.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2012.047152

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2012 Vol.11 No.4, pp.250 - 262

Published online: 01 Jun 2012 *

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