Mobile wireless sensor network connectivity repair with k-redundancy

Abstract

Connectivity is an important requirement for wireless sensor networks especially in real-time monitoring and data transfer applications. However, node movements and failures change the topology of the initial deployed network, which can result in partitioning of the communication graph. In this paper, we present a method for maintaining and repairing the communication network of a dynamic mobile wireless sensor network. We assume that we cannot control the motion of wireless sensor nodes, but there are robots whose motion can be controlled by the wireless sensor nodes to maintain and repair the connectivity of the network. At the heart of our method lies a novel graph property, k-redundancy, which is a measure of the importance of a node to the connectivity of a network.We first show that this property can be used to estimate repair time of a dynamic network. Then, we present a dynamic repair algorithm that minimizes expected repair time. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our method with extensive simulations and its feasibility with experiments on real robots and motes. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.