Towards realistic connectivity restoration in partitioned mobile sensor networks

Abstract

Summary The connectivity of a disjoint mobile sensor network can be restored by moving a set of nodes to certain destinations. However, all of the existing works have assumed that the selected destinations can be reached via direct path movement, which may not be the case in real‐world applications because of obstacles or terrain elevation. In addition, even if direct path movement is successful, optimal energy efficiency cannot be attained by neglecting the elevation or friction of the terrain when determining the movement path of the nodes. Thus, in the recovery efforts, terrain type, elevation, obstacles, and possible localization errors should be considered in order to guarantee the connectivity restoration while minimizing the recovery cost in terms of energy. In this paper, we pick two sample distributed and centralized connectivity restoration approaches from the literature to show that these approaches fail to restore connectivity in many cases due to the lack of considering realistic issues. These approaches are re‐designed in order to determine movement trajectory based on a path planning algorithm, which considers the risk and elevation of the terrain sections. Experiment results reveal several issues regarding the performance in terms of energy consumption and recovery delay. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.