Movement-Assisted & Application-Aware Connectivity Restoration in WSAN

In Wireless Sensor-Actor Networks (WSANs), sensors probe their surroundings and inform actors which respond collaboratively to achieve some desired application missions. Since actors have to coordinate their operation, it is necessary to maintain a strongly connected network topology at all time. A WSAN may get partitioned into disjoint segments, if a critical actor, i.e., a cut-vertex node, fails and causes the loss of multiple inter-actor communication links. The other actors close to the faulty node often exploit their mobility to autonomously restore the lost inter-actor connectivity. We propose a distributed algorithm to restore inter-actor Connectivity with application level Constraints on Actors¿ Mobility (C^2AM). Moreover, we investigate the connectivity restoration problem subject to inter-actor communication path length constraints in order to handle the data latency and potential packet loss and propose a Least-Disruptive topology Repair (LeDiR) algorithm. Further, we extend LeDiR and name it Least-Movement Topology Repair (LeMoToR) algorithm. To restore connectivity, LeMoToR strives to relocate the least number of nodes.