Self Actor-Actor Connectivity Restoration in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) are a set of coexistence sensors and actors connected wirelessly to perform cooperatively sensing and interaction to physical environment. Nowadays, WSANs are used in many important application areas. Main concern in all networks is connectivity of the network nodes, in WSANs because of majority of their applications, connectivity issue is even more vital. As WSANs deployment environment is not deterministic and mostly harsh, failure and partitioning of network upon actor’s failure is more probable. In this paper we put forward a distributed, proactive algorithm to restore actor-actor connectivity of WSANs that minimizes time of reconnecting the network and also total required movements of actors. We identify critical actor nodes and when a critical actor fails, we try to reconnect the network by relocating other actors. We validate our superiority through simulative experiments. Our approach serves significant decrease in total number of communicated messages through decision making for restoration planning and consequently decreases in network reconnection time compared to optimal cascading and other works. It also minimizes total movement of actors compared to other works.