Wireless sensor network connectivity and redundancy repairing with mobile robots

Abstract

This chapter presents a method for repairing the connectivity and redundancy of a WSN using mobile robots. It comprises three mechanisms: diagnosis, connectivity repairing and redundancy repairing. During the diagnosis stage the robots survey the scenario learning all required information of the problem. The connectivity repairing mechanism, which takes place after the diagnosis stage, finds the best deployment locations to ensure that the WSN has 1-connectivity. The redundancy repairing mechanism finds the locations where the deployment of new nodes best improves fault tolerance to node failures. The proposed scheme does not use any parameters or assumptions since it acquires all the required information during the diagnosis stage. Besides, its solution is very close to the optimal solution –in all the experiments performed it differed in one node maximum– but requires only a fraction of the time required by the optimal method. The proposed method has been evaluated in simulations and has been validated in experiments carried out in the CONET Robot-WSN Integrated Testbed.