A preventive energy-aware maintenance strategy for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose proactive maintenance strategies useful to preserve the coverage of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and protect its connectivity from the eventual sensor failures. Failures are handled before they happen. To achieve this goal, we introduce an analytical model to represent the energy dissipation of a node sensor. The proposed model is useful to estimate the life time of each sensor in the network. Once identified, the anticipated faulted sensors are replaced with new ones by a set of mobile robots. The maintainer robots are scheduled using two different approaches. The Heuristic Centralized Proactive Maintenance Strategy (HCPMS) uses a centralized approach to schedule a set of maintainer robots when dealing with the expected sensor failures. However, the Fixed Distributed Proactive Maintenance Strategy (FDPMS) and the Market based Distributed Proactive Maintenance Strategy (MDPMS) use distributed algorithms to select and designate the maintainer robot of each anticipated failure. Simulation results show that HCPMS is adapted only for the small-scale WSNs. However, MDPMS can provide a good compromise between the communication cost and the provided network dysfunction time in large-scale ones. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.