Deployment Algorithms to Simulate Large-scale Node Failures in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable monitoring surrounding physical phenomena in inhospitable environments through employing low-power sensor nodes with limited transmission range. A less resource-restricted base station (BS) provides long-range wireless communication to connect the network with the remote user. Within the network, nodes form a multi-hop network to reach the BS. However, some of the nodes may fail arbitrarily and impair the network connectivity. Depending on the network topology and the damage scale, network can be divided into disjoint subsets where some of the nodes are isolated from the rest of the network. Consequently, data collected in remote partitions cannot be delivered to the BS and the coverage drops drastically. Such failures can be tolerated with one of the existing connectivity restoration algorithms. However, despite abundance of self-configuring fault-tolerance schemes, research on the relationship between the deployment scheme and the recovery cost is limited. This paper presents three different node deployment schemes to simulate large-scale node failures which lead to partitioning. We have also investigated the impact of deployment schemes on the cost of recovery.