Restoration of lost connectivity of partitioned wireless sensor networks

The lost connectivity due to failure of large-scale nodes plays major role to degrade the system performance by generating unnecessary overhead or sometimes totally collapse the active network. There are many issues and challenges to restore the lost connectivity in an unattended scenario, i.e. how many recovery nodes will be sufficient and on which locations these recovery nodes have to be placed. A very few centralized and distributed approaches have been proposed till now. The centralized approaches are good for a scenario where information about the disjoint network, i.e. number of disjoint segments and their locations are well known in advance. However, for a scenario where such information is unknown due to the unattended harsh environment, a distributed approach is a better solution to restore the partitioned network. In this paper, we have proposed and implemented a semi-distributed approach called Relay node Placement using Fermat Point. The proposed approach is capable of restoring lost connectivity with small number of recovery relay nodes and it works for any number of disjoint segments. The simulation experiment results show effectiveness of our approach as compared to existing benchmark approaches. Subjects: Algorithms & Complexity; Computation; Computer Engineering