A Prescient Recovery Approach for Disjoint MSNs

Abstract

In Mobile Sensor Networks (MSNs), limited transmission range of the sensor nodes requires nodes to collaborate with each other in order to send their data to the Base Station (BS) which acts as a gateway between the network and the remote user. However, nodes may fail arbitrarily due to battery depletion, hardware malfunction, or an external damage. Such failures may partition the network into multiple disjoint segments isolated from the rest of the network. To restore network connectivity, network topology can be restructured by employing node mobility. However, mobility incurs excessive energy consumption and must be limited to avoid further failures and extend the network lifetime. In this paper, we present a distributed mobility-based approach to restore network connectivity while minimizing the movement cost as well as the number of nodes to be relocated. While determining the movement target, we consider the former locations of the upstream nodes but designate an alternative spot for movement to avoid possible risks caused the failure and to minimize the movement cost. The experiment results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the approaches currently used in terms of total movement distance, maximum movement distance and the number of relocated nodes.