Partition Discovery and Connectivity Restoration in WSN using Mobile Relays

Abstract

Connectivity restoration in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a common problem and several solutions has been proposed in the literature. Reasons for partition include initial random deployment, node failure due to low battery life, hardware malfunction etc. This paper focuses on partition discovery and hence restoring connectivity in a segmented network using Mobile Relay (MR) nodes. We propose a hybrid of frontier-based and random-direction exploration approaches for detecting partitions in a given area. An approximation algorithm for Steiner point based minimum spanning tree is adopted to determine the topology for connecting the discovered partition. Optimal assignment of mobile relays in this topology is visualized as a Bottleneck Assignment Problem (BAP). Our approach guarantees use of minimum number of MR nodes to be placed in minimum time. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can be effectively used for connectivity restoration in a partitioned network.